Player safety is all the rage at the moment, and rightfully so. Injuries are good for no one, not the advertisers, not the players, not the fans, no one.
So it makes sense that many of the law changes reflect this increased player safety focus (think concussion tests and the like). Overall, these are positive moves for the game, as again, no one wants to see players seriously hurt.
So we come to the Brumbies-Highlanders game played Saturday night, and in particular to an exchange between Sio Tomkinson and James Dargaville roughly five minutes into the game.
To surmise, a box kick from Aaron Smith is sent high, to be chased by the winger Tomkinson caught by his opposite number Dargaville. The resulting collision between the two wingers sees Dargaville take a rather sickening blow to the head as the shoulder of Tomkinson comes through.
And that was that. Over in an instant. The referee, having had a second look due to Dargaville taking a long (but very reasonable in context of the hit) time with the medics, awarded a penalty to the Brumbies citing ‘mitigating circumstances’.
I have to wonder what these mitigating circumstance are exactly. To quote the ref “he ducked into it” was the line peddled at the time, but over-analysing this lead me down a rabbit hole.
What if he had jumped? My immediate reaction was to wonder what would have been had Dargaville risen in the air rather than ducked.
Would that have counted as a mitigating circumstance? I highly doubt it. For a start, I imagine Dargaville would have been significantly more injured, and Tomkinson would have been looking at a red card assuming he carried through the way he did. Of course, we can’t know what would have happened, but it is important in the context of player safety to recognise that Dargaville had the option to jump, and that Tomkinson was probably overly committed and thusly ‘reckless’.
I actually believe he made the right call to stay low for the catch – the fact he stayed on the pitch and continued to contribute says much about his character. Also, I don’t believe that Tomkinson is a nasty player, just that in this particular situation he was a little too eager/reckless. It was an unlucky situation, but a situation where the team that did more things right and in the spirit of the game was disadvantaged by the team who didn’t.
Yes, there were mitigating circumstances but the game needs to address both sides of the coin on this. For instance, the player defending has to take responsibility to not dangerously tackle a player. Perhaps the real mitigating circumstance was that he was being reckless.
This needs to be addressed. If it is not, we could fall into the terrible trap of players being coached to jump in this situation, which would be the single worst possible outcome. It might seem a stretch, but I don’t think many wingers will be signing up for what happened to Dargaville, so they will try something else.
They will adapt, but short of not going for the ball I fail to see a way out of this for them bar jumping. If it remains unchecked, this has the potential to turn into a real prisoners dilemma. And that will only lead to more injuries.
It should have been a yellow card.
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