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There are absolutely no prizes for nominating the most contentious decision by an official on this Lions tour - it was that of Christophe Berdos, the French referee who otherwise officiated well, in not doling out a red card to the shocking Schalk Burger for his protracted gouging of Luke Fitzgerald’s eyes.

The ban of only eight weeks is a joke and I stand completely by my assertion that the referee should have awarded a red card and that the touch judge who was so close should have made the recommendation stronger than merely “minimum yellow card”. My original impression is that referees, where gouging or biting is suspected, must shoot first with the red card and ask questions afterwards.

But did Berdos bottle it? Was he cowardly? My original inclination was strongly to say that he was, but, on reflection, he was making a wickedly difficult judgment call with a whole world of sport erupting around him and, unless he decided to go to a darkened room and ponder for an hour, then he had around five seconds to come to a decision.

It is another issue entirely that the use of a television match official, so that the recommendation was being made by someone having all the angles at his disposal, would have helped enormously. But it was going too far to suggest that Berdos was failing in his duty. If he had gone back to the incident at leisure on a replay later and found that it was not a gouging incident, then I suppose that he would have been pilloried for potentially ruining an international match.

And, finally, on the subject of Pretoria, where, exactly, was the one camera angle that would have settled once and for all whether Mr Fourie actually touched down legally? There is no angle I can see which conclusively proves that he either did or did not score because the camera angle pointing directly up the touchline from the in-goal area was never shown. Perhaps they do not have quite the technical accomplishment down here as we do in good old Britain and Ireland. Surely the television producers here could never be accused of holding back an angle which proved something that they did not wish to be proved.

Rugby is coming home

Today, it was announced that Rugby World Cup have nominated England (2015) and Japan (2019) as the hosts for the next two World Cups after the debacle, sorry, I mean extravaganza of New Zealand in 2011.

How wonderful. Absolutely spot on. England deserve to host the tournament anyway, especially since the game will need the riches that the England tournament will provide to bail out the development programmes after the break-even Kiwi tournament. It is then correct that Japan should take over and carry the tournament outside the realms of the old cabal.

The vote has not yet been made, so we should not count our chickens. One official I met in Cape Town, who was campaigning for the England bid, related such a litany of ghastly political possibilities and trade-offs that nothing is guaranteed.

But let us hope for the best. I used to dislike England and English rugby. We used to come up from Wales and mock the blokes wearing cravats and yet be secretly in awe of Twickenham, not so much for the stadium and the numbers but because of all the planes going over and indicating a world wider than we ever imagined.

But now I like English rugby. It is good and balanced and rugby is not used in England as a substitute for life itself as it is in other places. Sure, there will be a bill to pay for security because jealousy on the part of those who resent nations which have things right is always a problem. Yet I fancy the Rugby Football Union to stage a superb tournament. I am so thrilled that the event will not be scattered far and wide across Europe.