As previously reported, at the end of the season at the end of October, Latvia’s leading rugby club in the Baltic Top League “Baltic XL/Livonia” defeated the home team “Geležinis Vilkas” 39:36 away for the second time this season in a very similar and also productive game, thereby avenging last year’s loss. play for 3rd place. As a result, the Livonians took 5th place this year, but with their performance in the last game, they confirmed once again that they were at least a team worthy of the semi-finals or finals.
The performance shown throughout the season and the very similar games against the two leading teams of the league “Baltrex” and “Vairas” showed that the Livonians were ready to repeat the performance of 2022 and play in the final again, but the awarded debatable and doubtful technical loss in the won game against “Šiauliai” , due to which “Baltic XL/Livonia” is five points less than it should be, those hopes vanished, leaving the Livonians in a very similar in the battle of several teams for the semi-final four.
The management of “Livonia” made a lot of efforts and tried to find everything in a fair, just and sportsmanlike way, but the management of the Baltic Top League avoided, often ignored calls for a dialogue based on facts and explanations, because they obviously wanted the four Lithuanian teams, or their own entry into the semi-finals .
After losing by only one point in a very similar game, the “Vairas” team has been subjected to a thorough, double evaluation of the performance of the game’s referees, in which several mistakes and wrongly made decisions have been found. “After the evaluation of the judges’ performance, 12 incorrect decisions of the judges were found, as well as five more disputable decisions. Thus, of the 24 penalties received, 17 were either incorrect or debatable,” Johnson points out.
“There was also a game where our rugby player was injured – he hit his head with a five centimeter bleeding wound. Usually, the referee decides to stop the game because a player has suffered a serious head injury, but this was not the case, and the opponents from Lithuania scored a touchdown while our player lay in the middle of the field with a bleeding head. Therefore, the question arises about the professionalism of the referees,” the head coach of “Livonia” is confused.
“There was another situation where our player was injured in the catch, the game was not stopped, and the opponents scored a touchdown. It is not clear what the linesmen are doing if they do not record such cases. Both players were taken to hospital and needed time to recover from their injuries. Clearly, such sloppy behavior on the part of the referees must not be repeated.
“I already mentioned earlier that “Vilkas” is a real Top4 team, which beat “Šiauliai” and “Vairas” who made it to the top four, and which deserved a place in the Top4 instead of, for example, “Šiauliai”, which lost to “Baltrex” in the semi-finals in the sum of two games by more than by a margin of 100 points. I think you don’t need to be a mathematician to understand that the Šiauliai team definitely shouldn’t be in the semi-finals and not in the top seven,” says Neil Johnson, adding that “Vairas” had to be in the semi-finals for certain reasons.
“If the Baltic Top League were to take place in a fair way, then both “Livonia” and “Vilkas” would be in the top four, but “Šiauliai” and “Vairas” would be beyond the semi-finals,” says the rugby specialist.
After the victory in Vilnius in the last game and taking the fifth place, it felt and also looked like the Baltic Top League, after all that had been done before, rather laughed at the Livonians with the congratulation for winning the small cup for the 5th place, as a “slap”. It is a shame that in the tenth season of the anniversary, the prestige of the Baltic Top League has significantly decreased, taking into account the way things were going politically,” says the head coach of “Livonia”.