Jérémy Rozier, referee of Auvergne origin for the match on the 23rd day of the Top 14 between Perpignan and Clermont last weekend, had a tense end to the match. In particular, he had to be escorted by bodyguards when he left the field, booed by a section of the disgruntled public after his team’s defeat. An attitude that Franck Azema, the Catalan manager does not accept, in particular the insults against the man in black.
“These are not comments that can be made on a field or elsewhere. We may find ourselves playing a match behind closed doors, we may be suspended, we will certainly be fined. We are really sorry,” explained the leader on France Bleu, who no longer wants to see such actions in the stands in the future. “He’s a human and he has his ego, I put myself in his place on the pitch, these are not things you can hear. There are excesses but that must not happen anymore. For us (the club), this is one of the issues that we must monitor closely in terms of our infrastructure, how we position ourselves during the match, how we manage to control these things and if there are any people who are not in this way of standing, we have to get them out.”
Franck Azéma, who prefers to highlight “the fervor that has existed for several weeks, the communion that there is between the staff, the players and the people”, however returned to certain arbitration decisions and, according to him, several errors which only made the situation worse: “The referee makes decisions, it’s not easy for him, there is a lot of pressure at Aimé-Giral. He was wrong about some, yes. But, we are first and foremost the ones at fault, we failed on certain things, we talked about it among ourselves and we will have to put things right.”
