The citings and subsequent bans of both Schalk Burger and England captain Phil Vickery have raised a worrying trend at the Rugby World Cup in France.
Both punishments seemed excessive for the indiscretions targeted.
Vickery was pinged for tripping a United States player. He said the trip had been “instinctive” and that there was no malice involved. The trip itself seemed little more than innocuous. This ideally should have been dealt with on the field, and the US team should have benefited during the game. He received a two-match ban.
Burger’s challenge, tackling a Samoan player in the air, looked worse than Vickery’s and he was penalised on the field for the offence. There are some who may feel that it was deserving of a card. His initial four-match suspension also seemed unnecessarily harsh. It was reduced to two matches on appeal.
In the same match, Samoa’s Brian Lima concussed himself in executing a late and dangerous tackle on Bok replacement Andre Pretorius. This looked far worse than any of the aforementioned indiscretions.
Yet there has been no move to censure Lima. Concussed or not, he should have faced the music. There has got to be some uniformity
All Black flanker Jerry Collins this week described the citing system as a lottery.
“You never know who is going to be sitting up in the box being the citing commissioner,” Collins said. “But what can you do? Like Schalk, you go in low and then clip him high. In that game you could have cited 10 people. It is just the luck of the draw who gets picked up and who doesn’t.
“Sometimes you get cited for things you wouldn’t normally get cited for; it’s just luck, really.”
Stamping out foul and unnecessary dangerous play is to be applauded, especially in light of the physical dangers that are part of rugby. But the powers that be are in danger of creating a citing frenzy for the wrong reasons, citing for offences that many in the past have not deemed necessary of censure.
This may also serve to dilute some of the attraction of the spectacle, with players being overly concerned about being cited.
Some level heads and uniformity, please.
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