The Rugby Thread (no league, AFL etc we aren't savages)

Loved the willingness to run it there. Gets the BP, could be important (to keep ahead of England!)

Well, it was fun while it lasted...

Hahaha

Some of the rules brought in to protect players is ruining rugby. I get it but it's a joke sometimes.

I can see it being a yellow. Still it's reckless he half jumps off his feet so losing any ability to control his movement, doesn't even attempt a tackle and just sort of tucks his elbow for no obvious reason. Definitely a card, red is probably harsh, but it is basically just reckless.

Yeah, England played well but not clinical enough. The effort and physicality was there but too many simple errors when they had chances.

Just watching it again. I do think a red is overly harsh. He's trying to pull out of contact as he realises he hasn't got time to get low before impact. He tucks his arm in to protect his ribs on instinct.

He's responsible for arriving there in a body position unsuitable to tackle a player who's that low which is why a yellow would be appropriate ino. Ultimately he's accidentally injured his opponent in a potentially dangerous way so has to be penalised to some degree.

However if you've played the game you'll have been in a similar position many times. You rush up to try and take man and ball, but by the time you get there the relative positioning you anticipated in your head hasn't materialised and there isn't time to readjust. You've been done, you're in the wrong position or in the wrong body shape to respond.

It's always been part of the game and the momentary confusion is what back lines are always trying to engineer with disguised passes, dummy runners etc. Here the induced confusion was merely accidental and due to the Irish player being forced to gather a spilt pass of the floor, therefore being lower.

These moments are inevitable when you have two lines of people running at each other at pace. I don't see how you can realistically avoid similar scenarios cropping up pretty randomly. You often see it when one or other player slips at the last moment. If these accidental incidents are reds then we're going to get a lot of ruined matches.

Not intended to diminish the Irish achievement. Think they would have won anyway and absolutely deserve the slam. Good example for everyone else right now.

Steward's red card rescinded.

From BBC:

The committee deemed that referee Jaco Peyper should have shown Steward a yellow card rather than a red, and therefore been sin-binned, saying that one of the mitigating factors was "the late change in the dynamics and positioning of the opposing player".

This is exactly what I was trying to argue, but more succinct. Glad the right decision has been made with the benefit of time and cool heads. Hopefully this incident can lead to WR educating their refs to be more cognisant of these late changes which bring more luck then judgement into the collision.

www.ruck.co.uk/breaking-world-rugby-take-action-with-radical-law-change-following-steward-dismissal/

This seems like an extremely sensible idea to me. Good work from World Rugby.

@grey_matters username checks out

That's also a good idea. I'm not in the 'it was fine' camp, and I totally agree it's an existential threat so there has to be some action for edge cases, but red carding players for essentially having bad luck that the dynamics of contact changed at the last possible second would also be an existential threat. This seems a good compromise.

Sounds like he wants to get ahead of the injuries. Fair play to him

I dunno John Barclay already has the Scotland pundit job kinda sewn up now.

Plus he'd just dominate Hoggy.
www.ruck.co.uk/watch-john-barclays-campaign-make-stuart-hogg-sht/