It’s that glorious time of the year for rugby fans, where the new season starts in the Northern Hemisphere, while there’s still some tasty action going on in the southern half of the planet.

And for rugby nerds like me, it’s always interesting to see the direct contrasts between the two sides of the rugby world: the differing styles of play, the varying tactical approaches - and the way laws are interpreted.

This week, us fans have been gifted with a huge controversy to discuss (OK, argue about: if you think Brexit was divisive, try taking an opposing view to a rugby fan). And it’s one of those controversies where there’s no easy, or right answer. Perfect to keep arguing about.

Last Thursday saw Australia take on New Zealand in the Rugby Championship, which is also the first of two games in the Bledisloe Cup, the annual competition between the two nations (like the Calcutta Cup played for by England and Scotland). The game was quite the thriller: there were four yellow cards, disallowed tries and lots of momentum shifts. The All Blacks took an early lead and dominated the first 20 minutes of the game, but the Wallabies fought their way back into the game to go into the sheds at halftime draw at 10-10. The All Blacks took an early second-half with another converted try, then powered ahead to 13-31 with a couple more tries. I’m sure I wasn’t the only viewer who thought it was game over - the All Blacks don’t often let an 18-point lead slip with just the last quarter to go.

But no, The Aussies didn’t lie down. Far from it, they scored three tries while the Kiwis added another penalty to their total, to tie the scores at 34-34 with eight minutes left on the clock.

With five minutes to go, Australia win a penalty and go ahead 37-34. What a comeback!

With three minutes on the clock, the All Blacks win a penalty, but don’t go for the posts. They want the win, not a draw. They kick to the corner, form a driving maul from the resulting lineout, but make a technical mistake and are penalised. Australia, about five metres from their line and with about 90 seconds on the clock, have a penalty.

Now it is game over. Australia can kick to touch, slowly form a lineout and then kick the ball out of play as soon as the clock hits 80 minutes.

But then something extraordinary happens.

Bernard Foley, the Aussie 10, has the ball in his hands and is preparing to kick to touch. He’s taking his time about it - which is par for the course in modern rugby, where time-wasting has become an art - so the referee tells him to hurry up. Foley looks behind to check his forwards are onside before he kicks - and the referee blows his whistle. He penalises Australia for time-wasting, awards News Zealand a scrum five yards out, from which they score in the corner. The clock is past 80 minutes, so the All Blacks win 37-39. Cue pandemonium.

The controversy is that the referee penalised Foley for time-wasting with a minute left on the clock and with a three-point lead in favour of the Wallabies. Awarding a scrum to the All Blacks five metres from the Australian tryline will result in them scoring probably eight times out of ten, so the upshot of the decision was likely to result in a match-winning score with no time left on the clock for Australia to score again.

So was the referee right to penalise Australia?

First of all, cards on the table: in my personal opinion, the referee, Matthieu Reynal from France, is a terrible referee. My heart sinks every time I see that he’s in charge of an international match, whoever is playing: if he’s reffing a Wales game, I always fear the worst, because the game is going to be a lottery. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he’s a cheat, or biased in any way: I just think he’s useless, not seeing incidents on the pitch or misinterpreting the laws. In my view, he’d already made some terrible decisions in this match before his late intervention.

Now there’s little argument among rugby fans that there’s way too much time-wasting in rugby today. The South Africans are the grand masters: the big units in their pack need more rest between plays, so they’re constantly on one knee or their arses, getting treatment for something or other. There are already more stoppages in the game these days, just to get decisions from TMOs (that’s VAR++ to you football fans), so we really don’t need scrum-halves taking centuries at the base of rucks before kicking the ball, players loping up at snail’s pace to scrums and lineouts or the many other spurious stoppages we fans have to endure. Is it time for referees to penalise teams more frequently for time-wasting? Absolutely.

Since the game, fans have raged about the decision. Some have taken the view that he was entitled to penalise Australia, especially as he did tell Foley to hurry up. They’re right. Others have said that making that decision at a critical point in the game, with a minor infringement leading to a major repercussion that affected the outcome of the game, was wrong. They’re also right.

My take? The time to establish a precedent - and penalising time-wasting is non-existent in top-class rugby, so any such decision is a precedent - is not in the last 90 seconds of an international match. If Reynal wanted a more flowing game, he had plenty of opportunities to penalise slow play in the first 78 minutes of the game. He didn’t do it, though (because he’s incompetent, IMHO).

What will be interesting to see is if World Rugby, the sport’s governing body, will now back Reynal by telling referees to clamp down on time-wasting. If they don’t, the decision will be an outlier and continue to be controversial.

Mind you, it does give us rugby fans something to argue about. And we always like that.