This week we’re going to talk a lot about our behavior…
Hitting, kicking and crying
A great weekend of rugby all round, for the top teams and a few teams struggling to find form. The Waratahs are back on track and the Hurricanes hit the fifth grade. Bristol were stunned by Harlequins while Saints, Bath and Leicester walked away. Perpignan beat a lifeless Toulon and Toulouse in good fashion. Glasgow and Stormers progress to home semi-finals.
And in all the top four teams, 25 games, only two red cards. It has been a far, far worse weekend for discipline. It keeps pushing one problem down somewhere, and it usually pops up somewhere else.
This weekend was just around the corner. Although not a high-profile game, the red card awarded to Alan Paver of Cornish Pirates was a disgrace. A full look at the event, or more specifically, the critical moment, is unfortunately not available, but the lead up to it is available on YouTube and is very depressing.
The Pirates bench can clearly be seen trying to prevent Jake Garside from catching the ball for a quick restart. When Garside realizes that the referee’s decision is, in fact, a penalty for the Pirates, he can also be seen clearly trying to get away from the bench members he was facing, and is pushed back into the melee by, presumably, Paver. On top of that the YouTube stream cuts to the replay and only returns to the action when players from both sides rush to silence it all.
So nothing is certain, although the summary of the judge is brief and not hesitant to give someone who did not know exactly what he saw.
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However, it is notable that although Pirates accepted responsibility, acknowledged its seriousness, pledged to cooperate with the RFU and carry out an internal investigation, it has stopped short of apologizing. Not that it should be until Paver has been reprimanded, but it seemed unreasonable that at the weekend when Geoff Parling was a little frustrated because he found himself in the media’s snobbery and rightly gave Craig Doyle a push, the coach who was aggressive and the opponent’s player should remain silent.
And back to Parling: what exactly do you need to regret? No malice from Doyle and his new player or anything, but it’s a shame that the TNT team thought they would be playing with such a ball in a field where two professional teams are trying to do their jobs.
Parling probably could have avoided the f-bomb, even though he probably didn’t know the live cameras were actually rolling; When broadcasting all the minutes of the battle of Gloucester-Leicester, one of the speakers who cut a wide transition several meters wide was ignorant and a baby, so why would anyone think that it would be good to record, never to be on live TV. Was he reprimanded for choking? Good grief, if people on television are going to talk like dirty school children (not to mention run away like them when trouble comes) they should expect to be treated like that.
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TNT has also at least apologized, specifically adding that the sequence has not been forwarded by anyone. But Parling added: “We have a great product at the Gallagher Prem and I’m grateful to Craig Doyle and everyone at TNT for continuing to innovate and think differently… he’s upset about the unnecessary disruption in doing his job.
And in terms of doing that job… not since Kevin Keegan punched two people making noise and had an unsteady and stinging eye almost 30 years ago, there might be a strong signal about opponents like Donncha O’Callaghan’s diatribe in Glasgow last week.
However Glasgow will be happy. For all the talk about using Glasgow’s antics as inspiration, how Leinster will be ‘fat’ and how they can ‘give them a full chance’ in the replay, it would do O’Callaghan good to think: it didn’t end well for Keegan.
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