Rob Herring suffered a brain injury in the 25th minute of the Six Nations match against France at the Aviva Stadium following a ‘tackle’ by France tighthead prop Uini Atonio.
The main issue was that it wasn’t a legitimate tackle, it was an incident of foul play. The French player struck Herring on the jawline, standing upright at the collision point with his arm tucked by his side. It was a red card, all day long, the type of incident that World Rugby are looking to banish from the sport.
Except it wasn’t. Wayne Barnes, touch judges Matthew Carley (England) and Jordan Way (Australia) and television match official, New Zealand’s Brendon Pickerill reviewed the footage and immediately started to mitigate down from the ultimate sanction.
Eventually Barnes reached a conclusion that culminated with the words “not a high degree of danger.” The English referee may be hoisted on the petard of his use of language. Let’s just pause here for a moment, he’s talking about a man who weighs 152kgs and is six foot four or so, coming in from the blindside of the ball carrier and striking him with a shoulder to the jaw.
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Play continues following the collision and Herring, his senses quite obviously scrambled, wanders towards the loose ball on the ground, and for a split second looks at it as if it is a foreign object, unsure of what to do, before trying to bend down and unable to grasp it, he bats the ball towards a teammate.
It was obvious he was in a distressed state mentally. The Ireland medical team eventually lasso him when that sequence of play comes to an end, and he is removed for a Head Injury Assessment (HIA) from which he never returns. Ronan Kelleher came on in his place.
So, the upshot of the incident where the referee rules that there isn’t a high degree of danger is a brain injury that sees the tackled player invalided out of the game by a player standing upright with a tucked arm and making contact to the jaw of another player.
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Barnes could not have known the degree of damage to Herring but it’s head scratching how he concluded that the act merited a yellow card.
South of the equator there is a more tolerant attitude to head shots under the auspices of not ‘ruining’ a match, passing them off as ‘rugby incidents’. It’s also where there is the more substantial support for a 20-minute red card – a player who has been sent off can be replaced after that timeframe.
It’s a dog-eared challenge to World Rugby but if the governing body is serious, really serious, about reducing the incidence of head trauma in the sport then incidents of this nature must be punished properly. If the citing commissioner rules the Atonio challenge as a rugby incident, then the sport is heading further down a road that’s not so much dark, as pitch black.
Player behaviour must change, it must be called to account consistently and even if there are one or two marginal decisions that end up with players getting red cards, then so be it. If it alters attitudes and makes the game safer that’s a reasonable tradeoff. Officials must play their part. There is a great deal at stake in how this pans out.
