EDINBURGH centre Mark Bennett and Glasgow Warriors prop Oli Kebble have both been suspended from playing for three weeks following their red-cardings during last Friday night’s 1872 Cup clash at Scotstoun.
Bennett was sent off for a high tackle on Warriors scrum-half Ali Price, while Kebble got his marching orders after he swung his arm and caught Edinburgh scrum-half Henry Pyrgos on the side of the head. The entry point for both offences was six weeks, but 50 percent reductions were applied after consideration of all the evidence, meaning the players will miss the next three meaningful matches.
That means that both of the players’ seasons are almost certainly over, unless their team manages to qualify for the Rainbow Cup Final.
The two sending offs occurred after a ‘captain’s challenge’, which is one of three law variations being trialled during this Rainbow Cup with the apparent purpose of seeing how disjointed and complicated we can make the game.
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The Captain’s Challenge undermines the 3 officials on and beside the field of play, plus the supposedly all-seeing TMO: what buffoon thinks up these ideas? Is it a marketing ploy, or is it a safety issue, or is it a method to get a bit more ‘Needle’ into the game?
The alleged reason according to Rugby World is to keep the officials on their toes, really! A revue of their efforts during and following the game is where the disciplinary aspects of the officials should be, it should not be a participant team Captains responsibility, apart from anything else what does that do for the authority of the officials, it’s bad enough as is with players constantly harping on at the Referee for some supposed myopia whether imagined or not.
A secondary consideration is what is the thought behind introducing a bench player replacement for a Red Carded player after 20 minutes? Well my thought is that ‘the powers that be’ have realised in retrospect that some of these Red Card decisions are an excessive penalty against the Team owing to the fact that they cannot separate the potential danger of injury in an equitable fashion.
For instance there is a vast difference between a short arm and what they now describe as a ‘seat belt’ tackle that may or may not have contact [forcible or otherwise] to the neck. By the same token a players own movement that brings about the contact goes in the main unpunished, the on field decision rarely takes that into consideration, a prime example being Wyn Jones movement prior to Fagerson’s Red Card. Similarly a player ducking into contact or going into a tackle ‘too upright’ attracts attention: how does that work if you are attempting to make the legitimate action of holding-up the tackled player preventing him from getting a knee to the ground and there is an accidental clash of heads?
There have been far too many changes to the Laws over the years that have not been thought through adequately with regard to the law of unforeseen consequences. Changes to Scrum and Lines-out leading to players lining across the field a la League but with two additional players leaving less opportunities for open play, that was Bill McLaren’s comment on the matter and his point of view is good enough for me.
At the end of the day I can’t help think that the latest Diktats from World Rugby have less to do with player safety other than its use as an excuse because of the concern of a ‘Group Action’ for allowing players in the professional age to play to the existing Laws and the allegation that those unrestricted days allowed them to get Dementia. There are many causes of Dementia, my father succumbed to it and he never played any sport perhaps it was the metaphorical knocking his head against a Brick Wall attempting to get me to do my School-work that caused the problem.
The look on Ryan Wilson’s face. He seems to be saying: “You’ve got to be f*ckin’ joking, Boyo.”