How disappointing was it yesterday when the banal commentator Stuart Barnes said ‘That for me is not (even) a yellow card’ when Schalk Brits lashed out a punch at his Sarries team mate Owen Farrell during the Baabaa’s Lions game simply because Farrell was holding his jersey? Sorry Stuart, but your personal opinion is not only factually incorrect but it is also a very irresponsible perspective.

Thankfully Barnes’ perspective was not that of the citing panel, who did in fact deem it a red card offence and dished out a three week ban (with a further two weeks dropped for mitigating circumstances.) Unfortunately for the game of rugby though, literally millions of people around the world were forced to listen to Barnes’ immature and damaging comments. I wonder whether Barnes would hold the same opinion if he had been the outhalf on the receiving end? I’m not so sure.

(In this particular incident I thought The Steve Walsh played it perfectly. He insinuated to Brits that it was a red card offence but he would allow him some leniency so as not to ruin the game for spectators. Clearly illegal, an obvious citing but he’d allow him stay on the pitch this one time as nobody got hurt and it was essentially an exhibition match. Fair play you handsome devil!)

Unfortunately Barnes’ comments are not a rarity in the game. There are constantly disappointing examples of players, coaches, journalists, pundits etc dismissing dangerous or reckless play out of hand as purely accidental or just something that happened ‘in the heat of the moment’ and arguing that they’re not worthy of explanation to a citing board when the rules clearly state otherwise.

The thinking for this article actually started around the time when yesterday’s Lions Captain Paul O’Connell caught a prostrate Dave Kearney on the head with his shin when playing for Munster in April in the Rabo. My intention was not to criticise O’Connell but rather to highlight the inconsistency of the ruling, or lack thereof. At the time the citing commissioner, Eddie Walsh, (coincidentally, or not, a Munster man) deemed it unworthy of a citing. Apparently it was ‘careless’ not ‘reckless’. To me that decision is simply not good enough. It is not for the citing commissioner to decide whether it was deliberate or not. That must be up to the citing review panel, the player and his representatives to discuss and Eddie Walsh has done the game a disservice by taking matters into his own hands. He has potentially set a very dangerous precedent for other citing commissioners to either deliberately or accidentally wave away other moments of ‘careless’ play, thereby exposing players to unnecessary risk. This is not a player-centric approach to player safety and is therefore not of a high enough standard.

Now, I partly didn’t post this at the time due to not wanting it to get lost in the Lenners v Munshter bickering that inevitably took place in the wake of the incident, but also because I did not want this article to be interpreted as solely about any one incident, but rather about player safety in rugby union as a whole, with the O’Connell moment being a good example.

Staying with this example for a moment though as it is a very relevant one, another disappointing perspective was that of Alan Quinlan, the very popular Irish Times pundit, who came out with the following:

“I was glad to see that Paul O’Connell wasn’t cited after the Leinster game the other night. At the time, I thought the ball was there to be kicked …To suspend him for it afterwards, you would be saying that he had time to think through the outcome of kicking the ball. You would have been saying that it was a red-card offence.”

Simply put, kicking a guy in the head is a red card offence. Whether it was accidental or not is up to the citing commission to decide. The ref was on the spot and deemed it accidental, as did most watching, and that should of course have been factored into the commisions’ decision making process. However for Walsh, Quinlan et al to deem a lad kicked unconscious unworthy of even an explanatory discussion with a commission is a clear misunderstanding of the system and a serious concern. Walsh’s argument that it was careless as opposed to reckless is purely a matter of semantics and to have split hairs in this way was a real let down to the players of the game.

Leo Cullen certainly thought so anyway, saying the kick was “extremely reckless”.

“Looking back at it, yeah pretty disappointed about the way it has panned out,” said Cullen. “Clearly the player has been knocked unconscious by another player while he was on the ground… Listen, players have to have faith in the system and I suppose the faith I would have has changed now. Clearly there is an issue there… I don’t see how the player was going to get to the ball without touching the player’s head, and obviously that’s a bit of a concern… I think it sends out a pretty bad image for our game. Yeah, I’m disappointed about the way it’s been handled.”

Cullen went on to say it was important for players to know their safety is being protected by administrators and for them to understand there are times when they must show self-restraint.

“You have to . . . playing a contact sport, you have to be at a certain level, emotionally and physically, and there’s always a line, I guess… It’s important you don’t go beyond that. I just think there’s a responsibility on the game itself, the people who are in a citing capacity, to deal with incidents.”

When Schmidt was asked about it, he had this to say: “Anyone who has been involved in an incident that leaves a player in that condition . . . and we can get into semantics, the toe, the shin the foot . . . let’s be honest, you cannot fly-hack at someone’s head like that. Imagine a ball leaving a ruck and people fly-hacking at it, thinking it’s okay…Dave Kearney seems to be the forgotten man. He was the guy kicked unconscious. He was the guy who was subjected to CT scans and spent an uncomfortable night in hospital. When those sorts of things happen you have to look at kids and the global game and I think it has been damaged… But for Dave’s sake and I think for consistency sake, if you get 14 weeks for spitting – there’s no danger in that at all. Dave could have bled and it could have been very, very serious…. I think if something like that is not cited you have just created a base line that makes things acceptable that can be dangerous to the game.’

Even O’Connell himself said afterwards:

“…It was only when I looked at it in video that I saw how bad it looked and got a bit worried.” He did add the proviso that “I would have known in my own head that I didn’t mean anything,” and that’s the crux of the matter. I believe the man that he didn’t mean it but for nobody to even ask him the question (or any other player which may have been involved in such an incident) is a massive disservice to Kearney and to the next guy who suffers a similar kicking.

This isn’t an isolated incident though. Another obvious example was the furore over Alain Rolland’s decision to send the Welsh Captain Sam Warburton off in the World Cup semi-final. Warburton himself, to his credit, said of the incident:

“The IRB said if you lift up a player and drop him it’s a red card, and that’s exactly what I did…I can’t complain. There was no point in appealing against it and I didn’t have a leg to stand on really.” Fair play. This gives you an insight as to why he is so highly thought of in the Welsh and Lions camps.

Yet immediately after the event, and since the tournament ended, Warren Gatland has maintained that Rolland should have sent Warburton to the sin-bin instead of the straight red in the 18th minute. Sorry but that just isn’t the rules Warren and the rules really are there for good reason.

Then you also have idiots in the media like the The Mail Online leading with the headline:

“Uproar over referee with a FRENCH father who sent off Welsh captain in Rugby World Cup semi-final”

(The Welsh nation was in uproar last night after the controversial decision by a half-French referee to send off captain Sam Warburton dumped the country out of the Rugby World Cup.)

…and the likes of Dylan Cleaver in the NZ Herald, who wrote:

“So then, a penny for referee Alain Rolland’s thoughts …Did he stop to think about the occasion? It was a World Cup semifinal, the global rugby community watching and a fair few others the sport would like to convert. Did Rolland stop and think about the player? Warburton, Wales’ captain and one of the most impressive players of the tournament to date… Did he stop and think about the impact the toughest sanction would have on the match?”

I should hope not Dylan, you idiot. What Rolland did was make a very tough call for the sake of player safety. Fair play to him.

There are of course plenty of other examples of journos etc disagreeing with a ref’s interpretation of the law, or as in the O’Connell case agreeing with the misinterpretation. And there will also of course always be a degree of ambiguity when it comes to determining the letter of the law. Even the best law makers cannot foresee every possible infringement and that’s why a broad-stroked approach of a law such as the one encompassing the ‘spirit of the game’ is a good precautionary measure to keep players in check whilst specific incidents that may arise get dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

One real positive in rugby is that the sentencing is tough, but fair, and this also mitigates the risk to some extent. Northampton’s Callum Clarke , for example, who bent an opponents arm back in a ruck until it broke at the elbow got 32 weeks. South African prop Johan Le Roux, who famously bit Sean Fitzpatrick’s ear during a scrum in a test match in 1994, received an 18 month ban. (After the disciplinary hearing he stated that “For an 18-month suspension, I feel I probably should have torn it off”!) And in 2009 Stade’s David Attoub got 70 weeks for a grim gouging of Ferris in a Heineken Cup match. All quite lengthy bans and all therefore an effective deterrent. (You’d get up to four years for bag-snatching too. Don’t think anyone’s been done for this yet thankfully. Although John Hopoate did get 17 weeks for jagging. Grim!)

At the same time though the media and the rugby public need to realise a certain level of responsibility. For a man in Quinlan’s position to claim that there was not even a case to answer for is irresponsible. Data around head injuries and concussions is becoming ever more compelling and conclusive, as i’m sure he is more than aware. John Fogarty recently retired due to concussion. Bernard Jackman suffered twenty concussions in his last three seasons and said he often couldn’t remember the games. Luke Marshall has been told to take the summer off after three consecutive concussions. Wallaby Berrick Barnes took time off last year because the concussions he’d suffered were making him feel sick whenever he exerted himself (he now thankfully has it under control.) Scottish backrower John Beattie has even gone so far as to offer his brain to science upon his death so they can study the effects. Fair play to him.

To claim, as Citing commissioner Eddie Walsh did, that an incident where someone gets knocked out cold by a swinging leg to the head was only careless and therefore didn’t warrant any further investigation whatsoever, is a seriously dangerous interpretation of the rules and one that clearly needs clarification. The story of former Chargers, Dolphins and Patriots linebacker Junior Seau, who shot himself last year (in the chest, notably) due to suffering from severe depression that many believe was induced by regular concussions whilst playing ball is a tragic tale and the rugby world really would be wise to err on the side of caution in this regard. It’s not about better protective gear or helmets or anything like that, these things will happen with or without the gear, it’s about how the player safety is managed by the governing bodies.

‘Head Bin’ down under seems to be a step in the right direction. Now if a doctor suspects a player has suffered a concussion, the player is taken from the field to undergo a five-minute assessment. Only if he is given the all-clear is he allowed to return to action. Previously, the assessment was done quickly, on the field during a brief stoppage in play. The IRB have also recently sanctioned a study into the long-term physical and psychological effects of rugby injuries, with a focus on neuro-cognitive decline. A positive and progressive development.

Ultimately rugby is a brilliantly brutal and uncompromising sport but also one which should be played in a safe and mature environment. The bottom line is rugby is a contact sport and people will always get hurt playing it. What rugby people, be they tv pundits, journalists, players, coaches or fans in the pub really need to start insisting on though, is that the laws of the game are upheld and a relatively safe on-pitch environment is encouraged, rather than discouraged, by all, even if it means your team might lose a man or a match, for the sake of the players, the spectators and the game as a whole.