Pablo Matera and the Yellow Petaia Submarine; heat or light?

Rugby is a game of laws.

It is a complex sport, with many moving parts and its laws are also complex. It would be useful if commentators on the game led the way on controversial moments in the game by actually citing the relevant laws as part of the commentary, because this is ultimately where any argument as to the merits of a decision must start.

They will certainly end up at the words of the law at the judiciary.

A secondary reason for starting a discussion on a controversial moment in the sport with a fair statement of the relevant law is that referees are obliged to apply these complex laws, not simply react at the emotional level of the viewer.

This is an extremely difficult sport to referee, because of the combination of tremendous dynamism, physical aggression and complex laws. We owe it to referees to support them by starting discussions from the same point they have to, whilst we enjoy the benefits of watching the game from our armchair, as opposed to running from ruck to tackle to ruck etc.

I found the recent discussion of Pablo Matera’s yellow card for his clean out/tackle on Jordan Petaia to be merely the latest of many where vast amounts of commentary have been expended without anyone bothering to at least quote the bare bones of the relevant law.

So, here it is, the relevant law on foul play, from Law 9.18: “A player must not lift an opponent off the ground and drop or drive that player so that their head and/or upper body make contact with the ground”. All well and good, but what does that mean in terms of sanction (punishment, if you prefer)? Well, here’s a starting point from the WR website.

If you look at the example, which is a yellow card offence, apart from noticing the amount of hair Will Genia used to have, you will see that the player is lifted above the horizontal and lands on his shoulder and back. There is no head or neck contact with the ground.

Where does that leave us with the Matera example?

(Photo by Peter Meecham/Getty Images)

The first thing to note is that Matera not only lifts the player, but he drives him backwards, off balance and then actually throws him through the air with a downward trajectory. It is a very different picture to the example in the World Rugby example of a yellow.

The human missile launched by Matera first throws out his arm and it is that which makes contact with the ground, followed by his neck and shoulder and then his head clearly bounces on the ground. However, he does not have his head driven directly into the ground, nor is his head or neck the very first contact. Does this matter?

To answer that question, it is important to understand the genesis of the current law and frameworks around dangerous lifting of the tackled player above the horizontal. The issue is one of player safety. It is about an outcome (player safety), not which particular bit of the player’s anatomy first hits the ground after an act of foul play.

More importantly, it is not about benefiting a player who commits a dangerous act (being foul play under Law 9.18), because the other player manages to mitigate through luck or dexterity. The object is to eliminate as much as possible a particular action (lifting above the horizontal), not to focus on whether the unfortunate object of the foul play was lucky/dextrous or blessed.

In a high tackle, we don’t decide if it is red or yellow based on the player hit in the head managing to roll somewhat with the blow so that it is glancing blow rather than a haymaker, we look at whether there was force, to the head and then whether there were any factors such as a sudden lowering of height into the tackle. The principle is to clamp down on and reduce or remove a kind of dangerous and unlawful play.

I now quote from some of the discussion behind the development of what is now Law 9.18 (previously 10.4): “In 2007, the IRB Council approved a Laws Designated Members Ruling which essentially made it clear that tackles involving a player being lifted off the ground and tipped horizontally and were then either forced or dropped to the ground are illegal and constitute dangerous play.

“Unfortunately these types of tackles are still being made and the purpose of this memorandum is to emphasise that they must be dealt with severely by referees and all those involved in the off-field disciplinary process.

“To summarise, the possible scenarios when a tackler horizontally lifts a player off the ground. The player is lifted and then forced or “speared” into the ground. A red card should be issued for this type of tackle. The lifted player is dropped to the ground from a height with no regard to the player’s safety. A red card should be issued for this type of tackle.”

Eliminating and/or punishing these tackles are paramount to ensure that player safety is the highest priority.

The source is the Super Rugby website.

It is really quite unfortunate that no consistency or clear line has been found in judicial, or on-field decisions. It is fairly apparent that the intention was to sanction these dangerous tackles with a red card and that the onus lay squarely on the tackler/lifter to be responsible for the safety of his opponent once he had taken the player off his feet and above the horizontal.

Sadly, this has slipped into a minute examination of which part of his anatomy has first hit the ground, which has the effect of moving much of the onus onto the victim of what is defined as foul play. As a practising lawyer with a depressing two decades in litigation, I find this unsurprising, but it is disappointing.

If you want to eliminate a behaviour through sanctions, you need to sanction hard, with consistency and with as much regularity as is needed to stamp it out, or reduce its frequency. The logical approach, if eliminating the act of lifting above the horizontal and doing nothing to safely bring the recipient of your largesse to ground, is the object is to sanction strongly and that means red cards.

Coaches and players will take ten minutes or a penalty – they train to be down a player and the better sides have clear strategies for these eventualities. Only red and then the prospect of significant suspension can work.

I have enormous respect for Pablo Matera and he is a player I enjoy watching, so this is not to target him. However, I also enjoy watching Jordan Petaia and I particularly enjoy seeing him walking without spinal injury, or serious neurological damage caused by unlawful play.

(Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)

Rugby is a physical game, played with aggression and honour. It is easy to transgress in a moment, either through ‘red mist’, or carelessness, or even bad luck. However, if we want to keep the integrity of this great game we have to be relentless on the aspects we can control.

Lifting a player above the horizontal and then throwing him into the turf in a downwards trajectory is pretty easy to determine and pretty easy to sanction. Petaia’s ‘upper body’ clearly makes contact with the ground. His head follows and I note that the law does not state that you only look at the first bit of anatomy to contact the ground.

You have to take the motion as a whole to avoid ending in a quagmire of minutiae that has nothing to do with stopping a dangerous piece of play.

The extent of the sanction beyond a red card is a matter for a whole other space, but red is, and has to be, the starting point unless you want parents watching this to see that picking someone up, then throwing them onto their upper body is regarded as a piece of relatively minor misconduct so that they make decisions about their children playing accordingly.

Remember that players are given yellow cards for fairly innocuous acts like repeated off-side, kicking the ball out after a penalty is blown, entering a maul from the side and a host of other relatively non-life endangering acts. I don’t think this was conduct of a relatively innocuous nature and I can’t see any mitigation by the player lifting above horizontal.

As a lawyer, I am very familiar with the act that looks bad, but that actually doesn’t represent as significant infringement as first appears to be the case. An example was the Test match in 2021, when Australia played Wales and a Welsh player knocked down a pass in what certainly looked to be a pretty deliberate motion. It looked awful.

But when you looked at the law, the problem was that the ball didn’t clearly go forward and, whatever you thought about the law, it was clear that the ball going forward was a necessary part of the offence. Again, in that example there was almost no one quoting the law, so that we had more heat than light.

I also wish that World Rugby would invest in bringing together all the relevant parts with links, so that when you look up Law 9.18, for example, it also links you to the relevant Guidelines, Trials, Clarifications and Variations, not to mention other communications to referees from the governing body.

It is a desperate hodge-podge at present, and I confess that I am not totally confident that I have managed to catch every official pronouncement on Law 9.18.

Pity the referee and, even when you disagree, as I do here with Ben O’Keeffe, respect their integrity and the great difficulty involved in refereeing the game.

It would be good to see referees supported more by the judiciary and the other official bodies by only overturning on field decisions if there is clear evidence that they got it wrong, rather than the present approach where endless slow motion frame-by-frame analyses are used, bio-mechanic experts hired by the player etc are brought into action and so on.

The referee doesn’t get these. These things might be relevant to length of sanction, but the referee should be supported on a red card call unless it was a case of clear error in application of the law. And no, I am not a referee. I wouldn’t be that courageous, or smart, or fit.