Replacements for red card offences?

Oh the red card, another brilliant creation by SANZAR (sarcasm)

let's also have a green card..awardee gets trip to US..

thats my point sixo. its an utter myth that the game has ever been played in the style of this manufactured spirit. all the things that hold true in life, hold true in rugby, but that doesnt mean the rules wont get broken, nor mean that the competition for the ball wont be aggressive. the games of yesteryear could hardly ever be said to be "in the right spirit", with all the nonsense that went on, largely unpoliced. i think the players nowadays have grown with the times and are almost cleanskins compared to the shenanigans that went on pre professionalism. as i say, im not necessarily against what you and cdog are saying, just illustrating that this "spirit" is not based on reality. we all show mateship, humility (at times), honour etc etc, but competition clouds these things.

But eventually we have to make a stand on behalf of the game's spirit, the safety of the players and the fun. Anyone who should know better but still infringes or fouls has issues that the refs should not have to deal with any longer, hence the card system. I agree with the original premise that those fouls are sometimes individual in nature and to cruel the hopes of all the others is unfair so I would consider a system where a red card may be treated as an injury replacement but if a ref ever gets to the position where a card is necessary the team selection panel, the captain, his team-mates and that player have only themselves to blame.

Now here's a great example of why the laws of rugby surrounding red cards need changing. Ben Tameifuna's tackle on Ryan Kankowski yeaterday should have attracted a red card. i.e. per the Citing Commissioner " it met the red card threshold". He wasn't even penalised. So under the current laws that was incredibly unfair on the Sharks. But who would have wanted him to be sent off with the Chiefs down to 14 men and the impact that would have had? If it was a red card offence then a new way to handle it could be; The TMO should be able to tell the referee, Ben should have been penalised, He should have been "red carded" After 10 minutes he should be replaced by another prop. Ben gets the appropriate suspension That way the proper punishment is handed out, both teams are impacted in their different ways and the match is not hugely disrupted.

On the subject of foul play, yes. He was, I think, the second All Black player ever sent off.

if you are asking if i would covet the advice of colin meads over say, a roar pro, then yes, i would say he is a good authority on the subject!!

I too get very frustrated when a team loses players due to a red card, although I agree that thugery must be punished. I have another idea which you may want to comment on: If any player gets a red card he plays the rest of the game, but is cited afterwards. However, the offending players captain has to be replaced for the rest of the game. If it is the captain at fault then he is sent off with no replacement. This way you add pshycological punishment plus you give the opposition team time to 'sort out' the guy who was playing against the rules.

"im with what colin meads wrote in his book about this kind of thing."... Colin Meads, who ended Ken Catchpole's career? I suppose you could say he was an authority on the subject.

That was Ben May from the Canes who got yellow carded for picking up SBW.

yes sixo, i appreciate that your comment was more directed to the professional side of things, but if we want players to "act" better, then its starts at the grassroots, at the youngsters of the game. rugby at the pro level will cease to be the joy that we covet due to the fact that is now just a job. thats modern day sport for you, and we cant escape that. i find the game very entertaining now more than any other time in history due to the increase of structure, skill levels, speed and strength etc and dont really hold games from yesteryear as some beacon of how the game should be played. you are right in that it "should" be fun to play, and certainly at any level below paid employment, but putting in more penalties in place hasnt helped my workplace to be any more fun or productive, so cant see why it would anywhere else. not suggesting zero tolerance, just miffed at the assertion of being tough on players in a sport when we are given latitude in something much more serious as speeding, due to it being illogical and not workable to police in this manner. the ref i would suggest, as you say, try and ascertain "intent" when making a ruling, but doesnt this mean that he is being subjective? intent is impossible to determine in theory, but i know what you are saying (im just being pedantic). whether its just the generation changing or whatever, when current players are being more vocal about decisions by the ref on the field (and also post match) then maybe there is a growing issue. just like the ref, the players, admin, coaches etc all rely on rugby as a job, and i can appreciate how frustrating it can be to have the results of your efforts be in the hands of someone else. does being professional mean we should have more compliance?

i take your point. my contention (as with most my posts), is that we are fighting human nature in this aspect. just as having a posted speed limit doesnt slow ALL of us down, having more scope for red and yellow cards will not achieve a better situation that we have now. fact is, there will always be someone who does something stupid with disregard for the "laws" of the game. its all part of competing, IMO. i agree, anything that helps the referee is worth looking at. for mine, i would rather see the blunders picked up by the TMO and instruction sent down on the fly, no need to stop the game for minutes. the ref is certainly damned either way he turns, but i can handle the mistakes, not the blunders that often mean all the difference between 2 evenly mathced teams. i tend to believe that most of us (players or not) try to do the right thing on the pitch but the lines will clearly get blurred when it is a high pressure, combative sport. as above, there will always be instances where even the most honest of players will do something stupid, so i believe we dont want a situation where the power of the ref is increased even more. if a certain infringement does not affect the play at all, then let it go, its part of the contest. the saders v the chiefs got picked up 4 times for running into their own men whilst being tackled anyway!! i fully appreciate what you are advocating, just hard to see how in reality it is better than what we have now. unfortunately for the ref, things on the sporting arena are rarely black and white, and with that damn idiot box around, less scope for them to get it wrong. clean the rules up before giving more power to the ref i say.

Actually Robbo, on the Rougerie/Richie incident, you got me a bit fired up about it so I google searched a video of the incident and looked at it again. Rougerie (the centre) charged into a ruck where Richie was lying on his back and head butted him first then eye gouged him. Rougerie should have got six months. The other point I found was that any foul play complaint needs to be made within 36 hours of the match. After that it's expired. For those of you who feel the All Black shirt somehow prevents referees seeing Richie in compromising positions on the field there could be an argument that Richie was lying on the French side of a ruck. Not that that excuses Rougerie's actions.

Robbo, The Drew Mitchell sending off has been commented on plenty in the last few days so you will be able to get a pretty good understanding as to what happened. It was one of those two yellow cards and you're off issues. But on their own each offense didn't deserve a yellow. When Drew was sent off for the first yellow I seem to recall the ABs ramped up their scoring. When the red card came not so long later the Wallabies had no chance of getting back in the game. If I had been a Wallaby supporter and had been eagerly anticipating a great game of rugby and, even worse, had paid good money to see the game, I would have been furious at what happened. The eye gouging on Richie in the WC final was strange. The referee didn't see it at the time. I recall it was about 5 minutes to go. After the match was over and replays identified what happened it was obvious the culprit was the French centre Aurelien Rougerie. But the officials seem to only have a short time in which to bring charges. The ABs could have but didn't bring a charge themselves although it was commented that they expected the officials would. But seemingly by the time the officials found out what happened the reporting time had expired. So the whole thing just lapsed. Richie had scratches around his eyes for about a week.

People want to see 15 versus 15. Sending a guy off effectively destroys the contest, especially at test level. IF a guy gets sent off, he should automatically receive a 2 game suspension, but his team should be allowed to replace him, you could have a special "emergency" bench for such cases.

Zero tolerance dealt with in my reply to Stillmatic 1 above, cheers.

SM 1, No doubt you noticed I confined my comments specifically to the professional or representative level. This is the example that we are setting our youngsters and by inference where they want to be in the road ahead. If we demonstrate to them via a vigorously applied card system the standards we would like to set and the devastating effect on the hopes of his team-mates a serious breach can occasion we just may see Rugby as it is meant to be, which is fun to play and entertaining to watch. Yes, I see the frustration of the refs even in the high calibre Walsh-Joubert-Lawrence style of game. Also I dealt with offences which demonstrated the player's intention to infringe, to indicate to all a disregard for the spirit of the game. Nowhere did I mention zero-tolerance, the two are entirely compatible. Subjectivity is a overblown myth. Refs try to police all laws, sometimes we are left wondering why however they are only a few yards away from the action.

it's not so much what happens to the player in terms of how many weeks he gets suspended for or the length of injury coming into calculation, that was just my example. The thing i really feel strongly about is the team on the receiving end of the foul play should get every possible advantage available to them, rather then the offending team getting thier punishment dished out next week. I'm for advantaging the recipient more then i care about disadvantaging the guilty at a later date.