Why McCabe, Elsom escaped sanction

Conspiracy theorists will abound after it was revealed that the SANZAR judiciary felt two Australian spear tackles did not warrant any sanction.

South Africa, who have long felt that the SANZAR judiciary is weighted unfairly against them, again had reason to question the impartiality of the organisation after the Springboks lost 9-14 to the Wallabies in a Tri-Nations Test in Durban at the weekend.

There were a number of incidents inside the first 10 minutes of the King's Park encounter that had the South Africans fuming and then questioning the reasons why the Aussies escaped sanction.

The most noteworthy of those were a spear tackle by Wallaby captain Rocky Elsom on Bok lock Bakkies Botha in the third minute - for which he received a 'dangerous tackle' penalty - and when centre Pat McCabe dumped Bok counterpart Jaque Fourie in the seventh minute, the latter going unpunished.

SANZAR media spokesman Anthony Mackaiser confirmed to this website that the citing commissioner had looked at both the McCabe and Elsom incidents, but was satisfied "they did not meet red card threshold".

Scott Nowland (Australia), Steve Hinds (New Zealand) and Freek Burger (South Africa) are the citing commissioners and in the Tri-Nations the 'neutral' official has the final say.

McCabe later admitted he feared the worst and was awaiting a citing.

However, SANZAR officials cleared the 23-year-old.

"I could hear the crowd wasn't exactly thrilled with it when they were replaying it on the big screen," McCabe told Wide World of Sport's ninemsn website.

"I think they were having a look at it after the game, or the citing commissioner was. I'm not 100 per cent sure how that works, so I was pretty nervous.

"To potentially miss what is hopefully going to be a Tri-Nations decider would have been pretty disappointing.

"Dirty play is not really a part of my game. I've not been [yellow or red] carded or I'm sure I've never even been penalised before.

"So that couple of hours just after the game was hard to enjoy because I had that in the back of my mind.

"Yeah, it was a huge relief."