There is a very relevant statement in the TD Tip for rule 10:
“If they disagree then the TD should strongly consider denying the claim. In most cases, by denying the claim the TD shuts the door to all false claims. Upholding a false claim usually does more harm to more players than denying an accurate claim.”
In other words, the prejudice of the TD should always be toward denying the claim. And there’s a simple reason for this: In chess, there will always be an outcome, even if the TD does nothing. Chess isn’t like baseball, where a call by an umpire is sometimes needed in order for a play to have an outcome. In chess, if the TD allows play to proceed, someone will win and someone will lose, or it will end in a draw. So when there is a doubt about whether to interfere, the TD should opt not to interfere unless there are clear grounds for interfering.
What the TD Tip for rule 10B says is that if the players are both in agreement that the piece was touched in a way that made it appear that the touch was intentional, but the player who touched the piece says that he really intended to move another piece, instead, the TD should, in that situation, uphold the claim.
Highly relevant in this situation are (1) the fact that the pawn was adjacent to the rook, making it much easier for him to accidentaly brush his hand against the pawn, and (2) the fact that the move he had written was not Rxg6. The fact that he had been erasing moves would have made 2 less conclusive, but certainly wouldn’t have provided any evidence that his touching of the pawn was deliberate.
I agree with much of what you said, but #2 here wasn’t really relevant. You see he had written down Rf2 and started to play that, when he noticed that it would drop a knight. It was then, after he already had the rook in his hand for a short while, that he touched the pawn. I thought that he’d seen that he was dropping material and was searching for a way out. Taking the pawn in front of my king, with check, was maybe even worse than the original move. The move he finally made (illegally, I still claim) was the only move that “only” dropped an exchange. Again, I didn’t do a very good job explaining things to the TD either, so I really can’t complain about his ruling.
After the fact, I’ve realized I should have made a 20 A claim. When I initially said that he touched the pawn, he denied it (in front of witnesses). Later, he admitted that he had touched the pawn – just insisting that it was not intentional. IMHO, making a false statement to avoid a touch-move penalty was a serious transgression by itself – and I had witnesses for that one – and the fact that he’d made the one false statement should have added weight to my original claim…
The more you reveal about this incident, the more apparent it is that your opponent has gotten into some – let’s be polite and say, sloppy habits. (The impolite thing to say would be, “intentionally sloppy habits that enable unscrupulous behavior”; that, however, would be speculation about his motives, which neither you nor I can know.) Whether or not you were in the right, it was important to make the claim as a way of warning him to straighten up and fly right. I’d probably have spoken up even earlier, as soon as he erased a written move a second time before actually moving a piece.