Not sure the Japanese hooker has thrown one in down the middle yet! Japan finally get the ball back off a bomb, send it quickly wide and Samoa almost intercept – was gone if he held it.
I was going to say that I wanted Japan to win because Samoa have been so dirty this tournament, but then the thing with the Japanese hooker happened, but now this latest incident has put me firmly back in that mind.
Some tasty tours there next year! Post World Cup shake-ups might see some very different squads by then, of course, so it’ll be interesting to see which sides have the most continuity, which ones start the rebuilding cycle, and which ones treat the tours as a chance for a bit of fun in the sun.
I think Wales will fancy a series win in Australia, given the current state of Australian rugby. Whether EJ will still be at the helm is debatable after this debacle, but Australia are desperate for some good news. Wales seem to have weathered the transition from the old heads who opted out of the World Cup a lot better than Australia who ditched theirs.
England will struggle in New Zealand, even if this isn’t a vintage Kiwi crop either. The pack has a waning 2nd row, with Retallick 33 by then, Whitelock the wrong side of 35, leaving it to Scott Barrett to lead the charge. Dane Coles should be done too, whilst the rest of the front row is callow to middling. Not sure how many will decide to top up pensions in Japan or France either. England? I have no idea. And no, I’m not coming out at Steve Borthwick!
France will have too much for Argentina, probably with whatever side they send down there. It’ll be a feisty old affair, but there’s only one winner.
Boks-Ireland should be a cracker of a series. This Ireland side would dearly love to add a Bok series scalp to the Kiwi one, whilst the Boks won’t want to give an inch – and will also be looking to reverse the recent trend of losses to Ireland, building on the win in late October 2023. Again, no idea if there will be a massive clear out post World Cup by the Boks, but I have a feeling that quite a few will be looking to a nice cheque or two in more relaxed circumstances. Potentially, though, the emergence of a wonderfully attacking backline, depending on who takes over as head coach when Nienaber heads to Ireland. As for Ireland, the Murray-Sexton era will be done, but they’ve got such a good side, with excellent depth in most areas, so will be at the very least competitive, maybe more?
Scotland doing a grand thing touring the islands – good for them! They should be too good for the trio they face, but Fiji in particular at home will be monsters.
Italy heading to North America should be a nice easy couple of matches, and maybe we’ll see a couple of the U20 side that impressed down here earlier this year making the step up? Would be fabulous to see them growing more depth and kicking on.
“RFU are killing English rugby by undermining any progressive structure.
Jersey were Championship champions but Following a 50% cut in funding wither the rest?
Effing idiots……………”
Slade, the thinking from English fans elsewhere is that this is a calamity that cannot, for once, be laid at the door of the RFU, rather it’s the Sugar Daddy model the English pro game is built on. These are privately owned and run businesses that rely on people who are prepared to make huge losses, until they can get to the end of the rainbow where the pots of gold lie.
Even with CVC money and very large crowds the likes of Leicester aren’t exactly rolling in it, the problems lies, imo, with the English owners and media thinking they can base their clubs on Premiership Football and ape what happens there.
From what I can gather Jersey did the same as others, paid large salaries for players, staff and facilities and didn’t have the income to sustain it
Ticht
you’re probably correct, but haven’t the RFU cut funding to the Championship in the meantime? How can investors / glory seekers continue to put up money in that environment?
Slade, the clubs are essentially private enterprises, it’s the way the clubs wanted it. I really don’t see any reason for the RFU to fund clubs beyond what they currently do, The RFU is strapped for cash and is making cuts in many areas.
There are currently 10 teams in the premiership and now 11 in the Championship, that is far too many for the RFU to act as a bailout vault when things go badly.
The set up isn’t great, fans want to watch the likes Marcus Smith and Henry Arundell, but they have to miss a lot of games due to international duty and they aren’t even first picks for England
Scotland suffers due to lack of playing numbers and from only having two professional teams, plus 6 semi pro teams which in total cost way less than one full time international player, but at least the model is sustainable at the moment. The SRU dug itself out of a huge financial hole caused by the rebuilding at Murrayfield just as the game went professional, it took a long time but they got there.
One of the first things to go was the idea that all teams could be professional, then four sides got cut to two – it’s very tough only having two, it hinders pathways, eg Edinburgh brought in a good few South African journeymen because league points are not easy to come by, especially if you are playing 19 year olds in the front row. However these 19 year olds soon become twenty four year olds with very little game time under their belts.
France seems to be getting it right, at least in terms of their players – their U20s side was packed full of players with T14 or Pro D2 experience, and it really showed at the junior World Cup a few months ago.
I don’t know anything about the state of the finances of clubs there.
I see people talking about 30 to 50% increases in the price of international tickets, that could come back to bite unions. I
know they are trying to make back what was lost due to covid, but it’s not an easy time to be asking for £100+ to watch a game of rugby
I don’t see how it was so very different from the card for Ben Lam that was upgraded to red later on.
The decisions from “the bunker” are completely baffling, there is no consistency, no dependability on the consequences, so players and coaches are not going to make changes as a result, there will still be high tackles and head injuries.
“I don’t see how it was so very different from the card for Ben Lam that was upgraded to red later on.”
I think there is a difference between these head on head clashes and the kind of tackle that saw the Samoan player sent off. There’s more of an accidental element to them for starters. Both red on recent interpretations prior to the seemingly random ones in this tournament, but not the same thing.
Thought the first Samoan yellow was pretty unlucky – plenty of much more effective offences close to the line don’t get you an automatic yellow.
Bit baffled that the pundits seemed to expect Samoa to really be throwing it around – powerful individual runners and hard hitting but often dangerous tackling and rucking have been their main things for pretty much as long as I can remember.
“I think there is a difference between these head on head clashes and the kind of tackle that saw the Samoan player sent off. There’s more of an accidental element to them for starters.”
Is there? The whole point is to get players heads out of the way of contact, the way to do that is to lower the height of the tackler – if they are going in upright it is far more likely that there is going to be a clash of heads, “far more” as in it’s going to happen a lot of the time.
This isn’t going to change until players stop tackling in an upright position. I don’t see these clashes of heads caused by an upright tackler as accidents, it’s just lucky if it doesn’t happen, it’s certainly not good guidance.
This has become my latest hobby horse, it used to be gouging, now it’s upright tackling, players will continue to be knocked out/suffer injuries from upright tacklers as long as it’s part of the game.
@Ticht – I get the need/hope to remove it from the game, but it still almost always looks to me like someone ‘getting something wrong’ while smashing someone in the head with your shoulder in the way the player who did get his red card did looks like someone ‘doing something wrong’.
CMW, the process allows for accidents, say a player stumbles into another after tripping up, whatever, if there is head contact in that case it’s penalty only.
I just don’t see that tackling in an upright position is one of these cases where it’s an accident – they are tackling upright, what do they expect is going to happen?
In fact the refs, along with the TMO establishes whether the tackler was upright or not in order to ascertain foul play, if there is foul play, ie the tackler was upright, then it goes to degree of danger, anything above low degree of danger is a yellow card, at which point mitigation is applied, or not, now at the elite level that gets referred to the bunker
@Ticht – I’m happy enough with sending both of them off. However, after the Scotland-Tonga game you were insistent that the Tonga players were ‘trying to injure’ people. Personally I think they were trying to hurt/smash/whatever people, but that they may see the potential injuries as a possible rather than intended outcome, but it doesn’t make any difference in terms of what needs done about it. Regardless, the Samoan high shot was much more in the Tongan bracket than the head-on-head collision that the Japanese player brought about through bad technique etc – surely nobody would argue he is deliberately trying to injure someone with his head in that way? So in short, yes, send them both off because the game needs to change, but they’re still not really the same thing.
Well, I can only ask again, what is the intended outcome when tacklers are hitting players in the kidneys with a full shoulder charge, catching them unguarded, if they are not trying to injure them?
Same with hitting players off the ball or with shoulders to heads, or head to head.
The difference in “hurting” and ‘injuring” is a semantic one at best.
If the norm is to tackle around the midriff then the ones that do hit heads will be accidents and they will be rare, but that is not the case at the moment.
My motivation here is that we do not end up with more players in the same situation as Steve Thompson, Ryan Jones etc.
Coaches are doing nothing to lower tackle height in the pro game, the only way they will be moved to do so is if there are more red cards and longer bans. The class action being brought against World Rugby by former players might get them to move on this, as things stand they don’t want games “spoiled” by red cards, thing have certainly changed since Tom Curry got sent off. For me that was a legitimate red, but he can justifiably feel aggrieved by the shambles that has followed in the weeks since.
@Ticht – I agree entirely about Curry. And I agree with the notion of both players in the Japan-Samoa game getting red cards so no argument about the need to change what people are doing. There are lots of things that can get you a red card though and many of them are different things to each other. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether being too upright so causing a clash of heads (and copping a nasty blow yourself) is the same thing as smashing someone else in the head with your shoulder going for a big hit as I’m not going to be convinced they are the same. While the latter is not necessarily malicious it is in my view much closer to the line of being so.
It’s very much a side issue, but the difference between hurting someone and injuring them is not purely semantic – playing rugby is pretty much always going to involve getting hurt (experiencing pain), but by no means always involves getting injured in any significant sense.
Some of the differences over the years will be due to technology and tv coverage and also law changes.
I think all of the red cards in this year’s competition have been for head contact in the tackle. The famous Sam Warburton one was for a tip tackle, that has vanished from the game, pretty much, and this is due to the consequences of tackling that way.
So a change of way of playing the game is possible
One thing I do find myself wondering is how come the Samoan teams for however long have been so into dangerous tackling when most of them are New Zealanders and we don’t seem to see it to anything like the same extent from the All Blacks or the NZ Super Rugby teams?
“My motivation here is that we do not end up with more players in the same situation as Steve Thompson, Ryan Jones etc.”
Which is why I’ve already explicitly agreed with you twice that both offences warrant the same punishment. I just contend that they are different things that warrant the same sanction along with a number of other different things. Apologies if this wasn’t aimed at me, but we are the only ones ‘talking’ just now.
“It’s very much a side issue, but the difference between hurting someone and injuring them is not purely semantic – playing rugby is pretty much always going to involve getting hurt (experiencing pain), but by no means always involves getting injured in any significant sense.”
We’ve probably all known players that go out to hurt opponents, most of them did so by tackling really hard, but legally. As a prop you wanted to get the sense that your opponent was hurting.
To me that is a different thing entirely to engaging in dangerous foul play.
In the old days it was stamping, punching, gouging etc, now it’s “badly timed” tackling.
Some players have been professional for well over a decades with hundreds of senior and international appearances, yet they still smack opponents in the head with their shoulder. That’s not an accident
Or at least the same sanction on the day. I would give the Samoan player a longer ban (though how these are determined is a whole warehouse full of cans of worms).
“Apologies if this wasn’t aimed at me, but we are the only ones ‘talking’ just now.”
It was merely an explanation of why head contact is the biggest issue facing rugby right now, imo of course, not aimed at anyone.
I see it an an existential threat to the entire sport.
I’ve stopped watching boxing, despite taking part myself as a teenager and watching it as a fan since before that.
The community game is doing better, tackle height is now below the sternum.
“yet they still smack opponents in the head with their shoulder. That’s not an accident”
It’s certainly (or at least usually) considerably less close to an accident than initiating a clash of heads in the tackle. Which is what I’ve been arguing. I’ll leave this now as I think we agree on all the important matters in terms of how these different/the same (delete as applicable) things need to be reffed!
“It’s certainly (or at least usually) considerably less close to an accident than initiating a clash of heads in the tackle. Which is what I’ve been arguing. I’ll leave this now as I think we agree on all the important matters in terms of how these different/the same (delete as applicable) things need to be reffed!”
I think we do agree on the punishment side of things, and at the risk of sounding like I’m desperate to get the last word in, I just don’t see it as an accident when head clashes are the result of a tackler being in an upright position. It’s bound to happen, not every time, but it will happen.
“Australian flanker David Codey was sent off in the fifth minute, which at the time was the quickest dismissal in any Rugby World Cup match. Warned after only one minute, Codey again trampled on a Welsh player in a ruck and was told to leave the field. The game continued and Australia lost by a point.”
That was pretty good going in those days. Still, it meant Wales’ highest ever finish and likely to stay that way for a good bit longer. I think Australia were actually a very good team, lost a great semi-final and would presumably have put us away without much fuss but for the sending off.
Scotland have had a few shoulder to head reds recently – Grant Gilchrist and Zander Fagerson x2
The one I remember most was Scott Murray becoming the first Scot (or first Scott) in the 6N to be sent off. Jiffy isn’t too sure about the card
……..good / interesting debate. My view (fwiw) is that the tackler must be more aware of possible outcomes. I think most experienced watchers can see the difference between malicious intent and stupidity (both resulting in reds) and that is when the disciplinary panel can up the sanction due to malicious intent.
:quality(70):focal(1986x276:1996x286)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/YU2GURKC7IARJDNYEIMO2RCEOI.jpg)
Ovally Balls 
Bloody hell, the Samoan 12(?) has a boot on him. 55m+ penalty and it only just dropped short.
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Yeah that was inches short! Fairly low key start to the match otherwise.
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Not sure the Japanese hooker has thrown one in down the middle yet! Japan finally get the ball back off a bomb, send it quickly wide and Samoa almost intercept – was gone if he held it.
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Summer tours 2024
Wales v Australia
England v NZ
France v Argentina
Ireland v South Africa
Scotland v Fiji, Samoa, Tonga
Italy v Canada, USA
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Nice try from Japan
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I’m surprised that Michael Leitch is only 34, he seems to have been around for a hell of a long time
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WordPress ate my comment about them having to go back to check the ‘tackle’ by the Japan #2. He was staggering around after that.
And now they are. Yellow & bunker.
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Remains yellow
Who gives a fuck about head collisions?
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I was going to say that I wanted Japan to win because Samoa have been so dirty this tournament, but then the thing with the Japanese hooker happened, but now this latest incident has put me firmly back in that mind.
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scandalous – and looks extremely biased
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Marius Junker has always been a bit pish, as a TMO.
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I don’t see the difference between that and Jamie Ritchie
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Some tasty tours there next year! Post World Cup shake-ups might see some very different squads by then, of course, so it’ll be interesting to see which sides have the most continuity, which ones start the rebuilding cycle, and which ones treat the tours as a chance for a bit of fun in the sun.
I think Wales will fancy a series win in Australia, given the current state of Australian rugby. Whether EJ will still be at the helm is debatable after this debacle, but Australia are desperate for some good news. Wales seem to have weathered the transition from the old heads who opted out of the World Cup a lot better than Australia who ditched theirs.
England will struggle in New Zealand, even if this isn’t a vintage Kiwi crop either. The pack has a waning 2nd row, with Retallick 33 by then, Whitelock the wrong side of 35, leaving it to Scott Barrett to lead the charge. Dane Coles should be done too, whilst the rest of the front row is callow to middling. Not sure how many will decide to top up pensions in Japan or France either. England? I have no idea. And no, I’m not coming out at Steve Borthwick!
France will have too much for Argentina, probably with whatever side they send down there. It’ll be a feisty old affair, but there’s only one winner.
Boks-Ireland should be a cracker of a series. This Ireland side would dearly love to add a Bok series scalp to the Kiwi one, whilst the Boks won’t want to give an inch – and will also be looking to reverse the recent trend of losses to Ireland, building on the win in late October 2023. Again, no idea if there will be a massive clear out post World Cup by the Boks, but I have a feeling that quite a few will be looking to a nice cheque or two in more relaxed circumstances. Potentially, though, the emergence of a wonderfully attacking backline, depending on who takes over as head coach when Nienaber heads to Ireland. As for Ireland, the Murray-Sexton era will be done, but they’ve got such a good side, with excellent depth in most areas, so will be at the very least competitive, maybe more?
Scotland doing a grand thing touring the islands – good for them! They should be too good for the trio they face, but Fiji in particular at home will be monsters.
Italy heading to North America should be a nice easy couple of matches, and maybe we’ll see a couple of the U20 side that impressed down here earlier this year making the step up? Would be fabulous to see them growing more depth and kicking on.
Do Japan get a gig at all?
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A nice stat to start the weekend (nicked off the Graun):
Japan have won 9 of their past 11 World Cup pool games.
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“RFU are killing English rugby by undermining any progressive structure.
Jersey were Championship champions but Following a 50% cut in funding wither the rest?
Effing idiots……………”
Slade, the thinking from English fans elsewhere is that this is a calamity that cannot, for once, be laid at the door of the RFU, rather it’s the Sugar Daddy model the English pro game is built on. These are privately owned and run businesses that rely on people who are prepared to make huge losses, until they can get to the end of the rainbow where the pots of gold lie.
Even with CVC money and very large crowds the likes of Leicester aren’t exactly rolling in it, the problems lies, imo, with the English owners and media thinking they can base their clubs on Premiership Football and ape what happens there.
From what I can gather Jersey did the same as others, paid large salaries for players, staff and facilities and didn’t have the income to sustain it
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Ticht
you’re probably correct, but haven’t the RFU cut funding to the Championship in the meantime? How can investors / glory seekers continue to put up money in that environment?
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…….. and still annoyed that the Japanese guy was confirmed as a yellow. It was absolutely stone cold direct skull on skull
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Slade, the clubs are essentially private enterprises, it’s the way the clubs wanted it. I really don’t see any reason for the RFU to fund clubs beyond what they currently do, The RFU is strapped for cash and is making cuts in many areas.
There are currently 10 teams in the premiership and now 11 in the Championship, that is far too many for the RFU to act as a bailout vault when things go badly.
The set up isn’t great, fans want to watch the likes Marcus Smith and Henry Arundell, but they have to miss a lot of games due to international duty and they aren’t even first picks for England
Scotland suffers due to lack of playing numbers and from only having two professional teams, plus 6 semi pro teams which in total cost way less than one full time international player, but at least the model is sustainable at the moment. The SRU dug itself out of a huge financial hole caused by the rebuilding at Murrayfield just as the game went professional, it took a long time but they got there.
One of the first things to go was the idea that all teams could be professional, then four sides got cut to two – it’s very tough only having two, it hinders pathways, eg Edinburgh brought in a good few South African journeymen because league points are not easy to come by, especially if you are playing 19 year olds in the front row. However these 19 year olds soon become twenty four year olds with very little game time under their belts.
France seems to be getting it right, at least in terms of their players – their U20s side was packed full of players with T14 or Pro D2 experience, and it really showed at the junior World Cup a few months ago.
I don’t know anything about the state of the finances of clubs there.
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I see people talking about 30 to 50% increases in the price of international tickets, that could come back to bite unions. I
know they are trying to make back what was lost due to covid, but it’s not an easy time to be asking for £100+ to watch a game of rugby
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I agree on the card for the Japanese hooker.
I don’t see how it was so very different from the card for Ben Lam that was upgraded to red later on.
The decisions from “the bunker” are completely baffling, there is no consistency, no dependability on the consequences, so players and coaches are not going to make changes as a result, there will still be high tackles and head injuries.
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“I don’t see how it was so very different from the card for Ben Lam that was upgraded to red later on.”
I think there is a difference between these head on head clashes and the kind of tackle that saw the Samoan player sent off. There’s more of an accidental element to them for starters. Both red on recent interpretations prior to the seemingly random ones in this tournament, but not the same thing.
Thought the first Samoan yellow was pretty unlucky – plenty of much more effective offences close to the line don’t get you an automatic yellow.
Bit baffled that the pundits seemed to expect Samoa to really be throwing it around – powerful individual runners and hard hitting but often dangerous tackling and rucking have been their main things for pretty much as long as I can remember.
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Ticht
I drove to Lourdes via Tarbes this week. I was amazed by the number of kids (boys and girls) playing rugby on Tarbes pitches – impressive!
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….. Tarbes itself has rather slipped from Top14 days!
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“I think there is a difference between these head on head clashes and the kind of tackle that saw the Samoan player sent off. There’s more of an accidental element to them for starters.”
Is there? The whole point is to get players heads out of the way of contact, the way to do that is to lower the height of the tackler – if they are going in upright it is far more likely that there is going to be a clash of heads, “far more” as in it’s going to happen a lot of the time.
This isn’t going to change until players stop tackling in an upright position. I don’t see these clashes of heads caused by an upright tackler as accidents, it’s just lucky if it doesn’t happen, it’s certainly not good guidance.
This has become my latest hobby horse, it used to be gouging, now it’s upright tackling, players will continue to be knocked out/suffer injuries from upright tacklers as long as it’s part of the game.
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CMW, I wrote a reply but it disappeared, I’ll wait a few minutes to see if it magically reappears
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Ah, there we are
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@Ticht – I get the need/hope to remove it from the game, but it still almost always looks to me like someone ‘getting something wrong’ while smashing someone in the head with your shoulder in the way the player who did get his red card did looks like someone ‘doing something wrong’.
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CMW, the process allows for accidents, say a player stumbles into another after tripping up, whatever, if there is head contact in that case it’s penalty only.
I just don’t see that tackling in an upright position is one of these cases where it’s an accident – they are tackling upright, what do they expect is going to happen?
In fact the refs, along with the TMO establishes whether the tackler was upright or not in order to ascertain foul play, if there is foul play, ie the tackler was upright, then it goes to degree of danger, anything above low degree of danger is a yellow card, at which point mitigation is applied, or not, now at the elite level that gets referred to the bunker
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@Ticht – I’m happy enough with sending both of them off. However, after the Scotland-Tonga game you were insistent that the Tonga players were ‘trying to injure’ people. Personally I think they were trying to hurt/smash/whatever people, but that they may see the potential injuries as a possible rather than intended outcome, but it doesn’t make any difference in terms of what needs done about it. Regardless, the Samoan high shot was much more in the Tongan bracket than the head-on-head collision that the Japanese player brought about through bad technique etc – surely nobody would argue he is deliberately trying to injure someone with his head in that way? So in short, yes, send them both off because the game needs to change, but they’re still not really the same thing.
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Well, I can only ask again, what is the intended outcome when tacklers are hitting players in the kidneys with a full shoulder charge, catching them unguarded, if they are not trying to injure them?
Same with hitting players off the ball or with shoulders to heads, or head to head.
The difference in “hurting” and ‘injuring” is a semantic one at best.
If the norm is to tackle around the midriff then the ones that do hit heads will be accidents and they will be rare, but that is not the case at the moment.
My motivation here is that we do not end up with more players in the same situation as Steve Thompson, Ryan Jones etc.
Coaches are doing nothing to lower tackle height in the pro game, the only way they will be moved to do so is if there are more red cards and longer bans. The class action being brought against World Rugby by former players might get them to move on this, as things stand they don’t want games “spoiled” by red cards, thing have certainly changed since Tom Curry got sent off. For me that was a legitimate red, but he can justifiably feel aggrieved by the shambles that has followed in the weeks since.
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@Ticht – I agree entirely about Curry. And I agree with the notion of both players in the Japan-Samoa game getting red cards so no argument about the need to change what people are doing. There are lots of things that can get you a red card though and many of them are different things to each other. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether being too upright so causing a clash of heads (and copping a nasty blow yourself) is the same thing as smashing someone else in the head with your shoulder going for a big hit as I’m not going to be convinced they are the same. While the latter is not necessarily malicious it is in my view much closer to the line of being so.
It’s very much a side issue, but the difference between hurting someone and injuring them is not purely semantic – playing rugby is pretty much always going to involve getting hurt (experiencing pain), but by no means always involves getting injured in any significant sense.
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There is a list here of red cards at world cups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rugby_World_Cup_red_cards
Some of the differences over the years will be due to technology and tv coverage and also law changes.
I think all of the red cards in this year’s competition have been for head contact in the tackle. The famous Sam Warburton one was for a tip tackle, that has vanished from the game, pretty much, and this is due to the consequences of tackling that way.
So a change of way of playing the game is possible
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One thing I do find myself wondering is how come the Samoan teams for however long have been so into dangerous tackling when most of them are New Zealanders and we don’t seem to see it to anything like the same extent from the All Blacks or the NZ Super Rugby teams?
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The first one on that list is probably still the most spectacular one!
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“My motivation here is that we do not end up with more players in the same situation as Steve Thompson, Ryan Jones etc.”
Which is why I’ve already explicitly agreed with you twice that both offences warrant the same punishment. I just contend that they are different things that warrant the same sanction along with a number of other different things. Apologies if this wasn’t aimed at me, but we are the only ones ‘talking’ just now.
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“It’s very much a side issue, but the difference between hurting someone and injuring them is not purely semantic – playing rugby is pretty much always going to involve getting hurt (experiencing pain), but by no means always involves getting injured in any significant sense.”
We’ve probably all known players that go out to hurt opponents, most of them did so by tackling really hard, but legally. As a prop you wanted to get the sense that your opponent was hurting.
To me that is a different thing entirely to engaging in dangerous foul play.
In the old days it was stamping, punching, gouging etc, now it’s “badly timed” tackling.
Some players have been professional for well over a decades with hundreds of senior and international appearances, yet they still smack opponents in the head with their shoulder. That’s not an accident
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Or at least the same sanction on the day. I would give the Samoan player a longer ban (though how these are determined is a whole warehouse full of cans of worms).
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“Apologies if this wasn’t aimed at me, but we are the only ones ‘talking’ just now.”
It was merely an explanation of why head contact is the biggest issue facing rugby right now, imo of course, not aimed at anyone.
I see it an an existential threat to the entire sport.
I’ve stopped watching boxing, despite taking part myself as a teenager and watching it as a fan since before that.
The community game is doing better, tackle height is now below the sternum.
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Shelford should have been red carded along with Huw Richards, he blindsided him.
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“yet they still smack opponents in the head with their shoulder. That’s not an accident”
It’s certainly (or at least usually) considerably less close to an accident than initiating a clash of heads in the tackle. Which is what I’ve been arguing. I’ll leave this now as I think we agree on all the important matters in terms of how these different/the same (delete as applicable) things need to be reffed!
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I think even then it raised a bit of an eyebrow that Shelford wasn’t punished though equally I don’t think anyone was that surprised he wasn’t.
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“It’s certainly (or at least usually) considerably less close to an accident than initiating a clash of heads in the tackle. Which is what I’ve been arguing. I’ll leave this now as I think we agree on all the important matters in terms of how these different/the same (delete as applicable) things need to be reffed!”
I think we do agree on the punishment side of things, and at the risk of sounding like I’m desperate to get the last word in, I just don’t see it as an accident when head clashes are the result of a tackler being in an upright position. It’s bound to happen, not every time, but it will happen.
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Huw Richards is on the list of people I have been ‘reliably informed’ are at least sort of from Ystradgynlais.
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“Australian flanker David Codey was sent off in the fifth minute, which at the time was the quickest dismissal in any Rugby World Cup match. Warned after only one minute, Codey again trampled on a Welsh player in a ruck and was told to leave the field. The game continued and Australia lost by a point.”
That was pretty good going in those days. Still, it meant Wales’ highest ever finish and likely to stay that way for a good bit longer. I think Australia were actually a very good team, lost a great semi-final and would presumably have put us away without much fuss but for the sending off.
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Scotland have had a few shoulder to head reds recently – Grant Gilchrist and Zander Fagerson x2
The one I remember most was Scott Murray becoming the first Scot (or first Scott) in the 6N to be sent off. Jiffy isn’t too sure about the card
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Notable as the best reaction to getting sent off in any sport ever.
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Gordon Bullock throwing to Scott Murray was peak Scottish lineout, it’s never really been as good since.
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……..good / interesting debate. My view (fwiw) is that the tackler must be more aware of possible outcomes. I think most experienced watchers can see the difference between malicious intent and stupidity (both resulting in reds) and that is when the disciplinary panel can up the sanction due to malicious intent.
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I’d like to put up a new post, but WordPress isn’t letting me.
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Aha! I’ve found a way to trick it.
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