John Smit calls on World Rugby to adopt his ref comms ‘plan B’ idea and compares ‘most outstanding player for Australia’ to Springboks great

Springboks legend John Smit has called on World Rugby to adopt his plan B to deal with future breakdowns in communication between a referee and the TMO.

Last Sunday’s clash with the Wallabies in Perth was the second successive South African match affected by broken comms. It resulted in a touchline jobsworth running onto the pitch on several occasions to hand a mobile phone to referee Andrea Piardi so that he could talk with TMO Matteo Liperini about a variety of contentious incidents.

The embarrassing situation followed on from the first-half delay experienced 13 days earlier when the comms went down