Should injuring a player result in a stiffer penalty?

I had a teacher who had an irrational revulsion towards sneezing. People who sneezed in his class were given detention. Of course, that just encouraged us to try and induce a sneeze from some poor unsuspecting soul.

I eagerly took up this challenge one day when my friend cupped a fart in his hand and pressed it to my face (a technique as brutally effective as it is disgusting).

I brooded and plotted until I came up with the perfect plan. I emptied a sachet of pepper into my hand in the aforementioned teacher’s class and then proceeded to shove it up the nostrils of my friend as the teacher was writing on the whiteboard.

This induced a Guinness Book of Records sneezing fit and the teacher, horrified at this potential purveyor of the plague, threatened my friend with a month’s worth of detention if he did not stop. Of course he was no more able to stop sneezing as I was unable to suppress my crippling laughter from behind my raised desk. He got a month’s worth of detention and I got my retribution.

However, when this strategy was repeated by another classmate one day, the intended victim rocked back in his chair to avoid the pepper and promptly fell backwards. We’ve all heard the horror stories but thankfully this freak accident was limited to only minor back pain for that day.

The sneezing was forgotten and the culprit who had caused the other boy to fall was punished severely. There was zero tolerance of pushing people off their chairs due to the known risks.

Within a rugby game, there are similar tales of one-upmanship that players either get away with or get the book thrown at them. Much can depend on what the referee sees or what he feels he is trying to protect against. However, every so often serious injury results.

So should a harder line be taken with a player who causes injury to another player? Or should equally hard action be taken to a player that puts a player potentially at risk to deter other players from doing something similar?

In this weekend’s Six Nations match between Ireland and France, Pascal Pape – after much deliberation with the TMO – was yellow-carded by Wayne Barnes for a knee to Jamie Heaslip.

You can argue whether it was intentional or not but my problem with Barnes’ ruling was that if he viewed the incident as deliberate, why did he only receive a yellow card? What did Pape have to do to warrant a red card?

Heaslip is likely to miss the rest of the Six Nations with suspected broken vertebrae in his lower back. Does Heaslip’s injury mean Pape’s post-match citing will result in a stiffer penalty? He didn’t receive a red card but should he be suspended for at least as much as Heaslip is out of action?

We all want consistency and we all know how difficult the referee’s job is. There must be tremendous pressure not to spoil a game by sending off a player for the wrong reason – just ask our resident South African Roarers on their opinion of some recent questionable yellow cards for their players.

The law of precedence makes for an impossible task to draw black and white lines when cases come up. Consider the 2011 final between France and New Zealand. Richie McCaw joined a ruck to clean out Thierry Dusatoir and Morgan Parra seemed to lift his head at an inopportune moment. McCaw connected with his arm and knee to Parra’s head and soon after Parra was taken off. Crucial missed penalty kicks proved the difference that day.

Cue the conspiracy comments and favouritism towards McCaw – where would we all be without controversy – but it may cross Pape’s lawyers’ minds to review that footage to present a case for their own player.

In the interests of balance, Aurelien Rougerie was not cited in that match either for some questionable raking of McCaw’s eyes. The problem is the more these types of incidents go unpunished or do not even get a hearing, the more likely similar incidents will be ignored.

Consider the player who was made an example of by the referee. Alain Rolland deemed that Sam Warburton made a dangerous tip tackle against France early on in the semi-final of the 2011 World Cup. Warburton lifted Vincent Clerc beyond the horizontal and let him go. Clerc was able to play on, but Warburton was not only given his marching orders but also handed a three-week suspension after the game.

Rolland was right in his ruling but how many similar tackles have gone unpunished? Was the red card not enough or was this a legitimate warning message?

Bismarck du Plessis dislocated Dan Carter’s shoulder in a legitimate tackle and had the red card removed from his disciplinary record. His elbow to Liam Messam was deemed reckless but not so the injury to Carter. A hearing did not take any sympathy with John Smit, though, who was sent off for a similar elbow to the French captain Jérôme Thion in the Stade de France in 2005 and suspended for six weeks thereafter.

Jared Payne not only suffered the ignominy of a red card for taking out Alex Goode in mid-air in the Ulster vs Saracens Heinken Cup quarter final, he was also banned for two weeks even though he probably came off a lot worse than Goode. The hearing ruled that he had not taken sufficient precaution to protect the interests of another player. It seems that if you’re in mid-air, your rights have a higher priority than those on the ground.

I understand why this is the case, as aerial falls can be extremely dangerous, but if a player’s eyes are on the ball, it does seem too much to ask players to also keep an eye on other players.

Moreover, I certainly hope that we don’t get to the stage where rugby players become like football players and feign injury. Already we can point to unsavoury examples of this and such play-acting should receive the stiffest of penalties in order to stamp this ugliness well and truly out of the game.

However, I wonder what criteria the citing commissioners base their decisions on when they review dangerous incidents. Should an injury to a player reflect on the sanction handed out to the offending player? Or should the gravity of the incident be the only relevant factor as injury can occur from perfectly legal play?