Click:block making machine
John Nicholson returns to Planet Rugby and is discussing the hot topic over whether Leicester lock Will Spencer was right to be sent off.
The Wasps versus Leicester Tigers Premiership game last weekend was a great, free scoring affair which the home side ran out 41-35 winners. However, Leicester head coach Geordan Murphy wasn’t happy that Spencer was sent off for a supposedly high and dangerous tackle.
If you watched the match you might have thought it was a harsh decision too. While the rules of the game have been changed in recent years to outlaw some types of tackles which genuinely threatened the welfare of players, the fact is, rugby is a very, very physical sport. A very, very physical sport that, if you play it long enough will result in your getting hurt more than once. This is what happens when large men crash into other large men and while the laws of the game can seek to minimise the chances of this happening, it’s impossible to prevent completely. If we don’t accept that, then we might as well stop playing the game.
The ‘tackle’ that Spencer put in on Wasps hooker Tommy Taylor in the first-half was deemed high. And let’s be clear, it was high. His left shoulder definitely comes into contact with Taylor’s head but Taylor had laid the ball off, travelling at some speed as he did so and as much crashed into Spencer as was tackled by him. I’m not sure where Spencer was supposed to go, or what he was supposed to do. He was covering Taylor’s run, there was little more than a second between the ball being passed and the collision. Spencer could hardly have got out of the way and was hardly moving when the collision occurred. And he only connected with Taylor’s head because Taylor ducked down. Is it fair to punish someone for a high tackle on a player, when that player is low?
It was more a case of him being too tall and too close to the hooker to get out of the way. He just couldn’t have got down low enough quick enough. So what was he supposed to do? He’d have had to drop down by a couple of feet in a single second. Spencer is over six feet six inches tall, about six or seven inches taller than Taylor, and in such match-ups it makes it inevitable that occasional head collisions are going to occasionally happen. Trying to prevent these is an important and welcome change in rugby, but that doesn’t mean collisions involving the head won’t still accidentally happen. And that’s what this was; an accident, or at worst, an unavoidable collision.
This absolutely wasn’t the sort of red card tackle that the legislation was designed to prevent. At most it was a yellow card.
After the game, in relation to the tackle, Murphy said that “the game has gone too PC”. Quite what political correctness has got to do with tackling people on a rugby field, I don’t know. It seems to be used by some people as a catch-all term for not being able to do what you once did. So while his choice of words was something of a nonsense, he had every right to feel aggrieved at losing player early in the match for this particular infringement.
You don’t have to be some sort of conservative reactionary to worry that if such mano-a-mano conflicts are to be punished by red cards, the game is going to lose some of the physicality that both fans and players enjoy. It isn’t an argument for a return to the old neck-breaking days to say that there will always be circumstances when unintentional head collisions occur and that is what Edinburgh head coach Richard Cockerill said after this incident. “It’s a game of rough and tumble. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t play the sport. It’s one of those things. You want the game to be safe but you just have to go and play and accept that there are risks in playing.”
Certainly Wasps hooker Taylor didn’t seem upset by the challenge and neither did any of his team-mates.
We all know what type of head tackle the legislation is trying to outlaw, but there has to be flexibility in how that law is applied, because Spencer’s wasn’t one of those tackles. It was especially disappointing that the TMO and referee had time to stop and review it and still came to that decision.
We need to make sure that in making rugby safer, and it absolutely needed to be safer, we must also accept that there will always be limits to how safe it ever can be and that there is little to be gained by ever more officious applications of the law, but understand that there is much to lose in doing so.
by John Nicholson