Three Red Cards In One Minute In Talcahuano. Longobardi Had Already Warned Both Captains.
The Chile Uruguay red cards all came inside a single minute, on a surface that had stopped being a pitch by half-time. Chile XV won 33-12, and the referee had already told both captains exactly what was coming. REVIEW: Saturday 29 August.
Fifty-two minutes gone. Three sendings off, all in the same passage of play.
Uruguay’s hooker went first. Then both captains walked, one from each side, which is a sanction most people who watch this sport have never seen once. Neither of those cards explains why Emilio Shea did not get back up, and the state of the pitch has more to do with that than anything Joaquín Myszka intended.
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Both nations are already at the next World Cup. Uruguay qualified twentieth, Chile twenty-third, and the 2027 draw put Chile in a pool with Australia and New Zealand. This was two second strings auditioning for squads that get picked inside a year.
WATCH: the Chile Uruguay red cards, and the minute that produced them
The ball was gone. Myszka went anyway.
Myszka had been Uruguay’s best player: two tries off a maul Chile could not hold, and the reason they were only nine down at the break.
Then he tackled Shea. Rugbiers, who had a reporter at the ground, describe it precisely: no arms closed, ball nowhere near it, straight into the knee of Chile’s loosehead. Shea’s number went up at 52 minutes and Salvador Lues came on for him.
Referee Federico Longobardi did not need a second look. Red.
| Result | Chile XV 33-12 Uruguay XV (HT 21-12) |
| Competition | Americas Rugby Championship, round one, Estadio Huachipato-CAP Acero, Talcahuano |
| Chile tries | B Videla 2′, A Escobar 7′, M Dittus 39′, A Böhme 69′, M Garafulic 72′. Cons: S Videla (4) |
| Uruguay tries | J Myszka 22′, 35′. Con: J Ferrario |
| Cards | YC: Iñaki Gurruchaga 34′. RC: J Myszka, C Saavedra, L Bianchi, all 52′ |
Source: Americas Rugby News and Rugbiers match data.
Longobardi had already warned both captains
This is the part getting skipped, and it explains the rest.
Before any card, with the second half turning niggly, Longobardi called in Clemente Saavedra and Lucas Bianchi and told them he wanted more discipline out of both of them. There is one step after that, and it is taking players off the field.
Six minutes later Myszka went at Shea’s knee and both teams piled in. While Longobardi dealt with that, Uruguay lock Ignacio Dotti barged into Saavedra. Both captains went.
Read that again, because it is unusual. No law lets a referee dismiss a captain for his team’s behaviour, so Saavedra and Bianchi will each have gone for their own part in the brawl. But the sequence is unmistakeable: the warning went to the armbands, the armbands did not deliver, and the referee removed the two men he had made responsible.
Chile finished with 14, Uruguay with 13, and added late tries through Augusto Böhme and Matías Garafulic.
Why the mud decided how bad it was
Watch what a prop’s front foot does when he braces. It plants and the studs go in. From that moment the whole leg is a fixed post carrying his bodyweight.
On a dry surface, a lateral hit to that knee slides the foot before the joint gives. The ground releases and the player gets up swearing. Talcahuano offered no such release. Deep mud grips a stud and holds it, so the foot stayed exactly where Shea had planted it and the knee took the entire load.
That is the tell on any hit like this. Not the height of the contact. The back foot.
And there was nobody upstairs to check it. This competition has no TMO, because Sudamérica Rugby pulled the video official out of its 2026 tournaments to speed the game up. Longobardi made all three calls in real time with a fight going on around him. He got them right.
But the trade is worth naming. Drop the TMO and a referee is not only losing a safety net on forward passes. He is losing the second opinion on the calls that end careers and start hearings.
The verdict
Chile were better before anyone was sent off. Benjamín Videla scored inside two minutes on his return from a long knee injury and they were 14-0 up inside seven. Their coach is Pablo Lemoine, a Montevideo-born prop who played for Uruguay at two World Cups and took Los Teros to a third as head coach. He has now beaten them with a Chilean second string.
Myszka goes to a hearing rather than straight to a ban, and that process is not famous for consistency. Uruguay play Argentina XV in Santiago on Wednesday.
Read next: Eben Etzebeth’s own account of what happens between the red card and the ban is the best guide there is to the process Myszka now faces.
Two ways to read the captains’ cards. Either Longobardi enforced exactly what he had warned them about six minutes earlier, or he punished two players for a third man’s offence because he had run out of options. One is refereeing. The other is crowd control. Which was it in Talcahuano?
