Sam Cane says red cards are tough to avoid in Tests

If you hit someone hard at the sternum level and you are 25 kilos heavier or more, the whiplash of the tackled player will almost always result in the chin hitting the tackler. It is just physics unless the tackled player has no neck. Surely this happens a lot.

Lol Refing schoolboy rugby is a challenge at best. I do remember a game where a fight happened...The parents on the sideline seemed to be encouraging the fight so I made the players sit under the post holding hands while the game played on....One of my better moments as a ref :laughing: To me on the weekend these are Yellow cards not Red cards. Both ball carriers did brace for the impact which does dip them down about an inch, that would be enough for me to see Yellow not Red. I would have had a closer look at the arms in the Wilson tackle but I assume that the TMO was looking at all angles and the TV producer did not show this. I just think the Yellow card and a trip to the tribunal is plenty of punishment for those tackles as I saw plenty of arm tackles to the head that are just as bad go unpunished.

Olly, This is the reason why I think that being a referee in school matches was cognitively one of the most demanding things I've ever done. It is hard. I guess the answer is that the players have to make a choice. They accept the risks of the game as played within the laws/rules (just as boxers accept the risks and pain within the rules and accept the risk of disqualification if they hit below the belt). Consent and voluntary competition are factors that determine whether the use of force is LEGAL or not (in the law of the land, not just the sport). If you don't accept the risks you don't play the game, but the risks are defined by the laws/rules ( there's a story that John Eales told the ref he would take the WBs off the field in the 1999 WC final if the ref didn't enforce the law against eye gouging). As a player you would (and realistically should) accept that someone might accidently contact your head with a shoulder, but not that someone would deliberately do so. Contact with the head is against the laws, and World rugby is saying that it is a red card offense if there are no mitigating factors. Intent is not judged: the visible facts are determined. I think that as an elite player you have to have the skill and the cool head/good will to avoid contacting the head of an opponent. If you don't avoid head contact you can/will be sent off. If it could be proved that you had deliberately infringed the laws/rules of the game you would theoretically be open to assault charges. I think it might be more dangerous to play in lower grades against less skilled players. Pushing in scrums is dangerous, but, within the laws, all participants accept the risk. When I was a school rugby coach there was a guideline that insisted that coaches should not put players with thin necks in the front row. That is sensible. I have seen lots of legal big hits and hard pushes in Rugby, and that actually satisfies my appetite for violence in the game.

I am just highlighting the two sides of the story. To me player safety is key, but I also see the point that it is a contact sport which has risk in it which is not always from intentional foul play.

Having done all three sports, I can assure you boxing is not a sport of maiming people and league is the sport where I have seen more of this style of attitude then boxing and rugby. Yes the aim of rugby is to score more tries...but this is also saying stopping more tries then your opponent. Say it either way it involves bodies hitting each other which brings risk, particularly at the uncontrolled contact zone of the breakdown (I would rather take a gloved fist to the face then a hard shoulder with all the force and momentum any day of the week). And as I said the contact to stop the offload is in a zone that has a small margin of error. This is going to be an ongoing issue in the game that is going to be easy to get right. I do question how serious the game is about it since half the players are allowed to play without mouth guards these days....a bit of a mixed message about player safety.

It is opening a can of worms. We want players to be safe but at the same time it is a contact sport. At what point does the risk become something we and the players etc accept as part of the game. Difficult one to answer in the modern world we live in.

I don't follow league, but you get the impression that there is a culture that dangerous play is more accepted as part of the game than in union. Think of the resistance to banning the shoulder charge. Union is a hard tough game as it is and doesn't need careless head contact to be an accepted part of the game to make it look tougher. At least in union you know that it is the wrong thing to make a dangerous play, rather than it being just part of the game. And AFL, well, that's cheap shot city and they call it 'rough play'. The coaches and players should absolutely get it right. Hard good tackles would make a better spectacle (eg Koroibete) than any of these high shots.

Then shouldn't they ban pushing in scrums in rugby? Because players should learn to deal with the fact that they shouldn't push in scrums because it may break your opposition's neck.

Olly I should add the ball and all shots in league is to try and dislodge the ball as well. They all know how to tackle low. In regards to boxing, I believe its totally different to the rugby codes because the aim in boxing is to maim and concuss the other bloke. In rugby the aim is to score more tries. Concussion is an accidental byproduct.

I believe that head contact needs to be taken very seriously and punished accordingly. Even without direct contact to the head, there are many ways for players to get concussed without direct contact to the head -- which is also a reason why helmets don't stop concussions. I have seen some awful injuries, not just concussions from head contacts, and as a player, many years ago had Barry 'Tizza' Taylor as a coach. Tizza was a great coach and a great bloke. In the good old days, red cards were unheard of, and almost never given in a test match. In this test the ref was consistent on his ruling, and we should be thankful for that. Nevertheless, the red card is now part of the modern rugby, but the game is certainly loses out with a player being removed from the field, particularly in the first half. and there ends up being a mismatch. There is no perfect solution, but I think there is a better solution to what we have at the moment. The red card needs to be reserved for absolute thuggery and foul play, as it was in the past. When shown the red player leaves the field and is also put on report and may not return. This still leave room to remove a thug for deliberate foul play. The difference is that a replacement can come on after 20 minutes. A double yellow as it were. But the red carded player will also need to front a judiciary panel with additional punishment if necessary. This then means that multiple yellows should not automatically be a red card, if a player makes them and is off the field in the naughty chair for 10, 20, 30 minutes the player is only harming their own team. This is especially true when a second yellow (automatically a red) is "soft" say for cynical play rather than dangerous or foul play. I know that there will still be people who talk about sending players out to deliberately take out the *star* opposition player. As I said, there are no perfect solutions. However, one consideration could be reducing the number of reserves that could take the field, for example, if a red happens in the first half, the available bench is reduced by one... There are still 15 players on the field, just less reserves to call on to finish the game. But I am undecided on one part. If a red card is given within 20 minutes of full time, (i.e 60+ minutes elapsed time of a test match) and the play runs extra time, say an additional 10 minutes, should the replacement be allowed?

Olly: I did re-read your comment. I may have interpreted it wrongly. Sorry if I didn't get your intent. Do you see how I could have been confused?

The whole point of these red cards was an understandable response to the issue of head trauma in contact sport. We saw the expression of this in the recent RWC. Referees have no option but to get the red cards out of their pockets if it looks like there's a tackler's contact with the head region particularly if no arms are involved. This is because of administration of the laws. Send offs have always been a part of the game anyway, albeit less frequently in the past. And the references to RL are meaningless because they're wrestling with the same issue. The coaches and players simply have to get their technique right. Isn't that what professionalism is about?

Please read my comment again

Olly, you seem to regard preventing the offload as more important than not hitting ball carriers in the head. Not being able to prevent the offload is a factor in the game that players have to learn to live with.

Yep, the offload can only be controlled by a tackle that is about an inch or error room in it. Difficult to find an answer to this one. I wonder if the head risk is just part of the risk players have to choose to accept if they play the game. I think of Boxing for an example.

This is interesting. Watching the NRL I see lazy head high tackles all game. I feel for the long term health of some of these players. On the other side, stopping the offload in both Rugby and NRL is making it very difficult to avoid a head high tackle to happen in every game. Hooper and White also got nailed in the head. No idea what the answer is. Players health must be protected, but is it like boxing. It is the risk of the sport and you have to accept this if you choose to play?

Tough to avoid with poor tackle technique. Do we want Union to look like League or AFL?

I am in agreement with the Kiwi skipper on this one. Seems Horan and Kearns is as well. The ball and all tackles are to stop the offload and it has very little room for error. There is the letter of the law and there is the spirit of the law.