Consistency is all we ask for

There has always been an element of confusion on my part when considering a response to a foul play incident and the sanctions imposed by officials.

On one hand there is a feeling that every effort has to be made at all times to stamp out anything that can be construed as dangerous and which could end up knocking a player out of the game and so effect his livelihood. It is a serious consideration - for instance, it is debatable that De Wet Barry has ever been quite the same player he was before the vicious off the ball tackle from Japie Mulder that cut him down at the start of the 2001 season.

If my memory serves me correctly, Mulder was ruled out for just two matches for an incident that cost Barry six weeks. But then I also go back to a conversation I had at King's Park about 10 years ago with former Natal and Northern Transvaal scrumhalf Robert du Preez. Natal had just beaten Eastern Province in a Currie Cup match, but all Du Preez was concerned about was the sending off of opposing lock Adri Geldenhuys for over-zealous raking (why do I sense some wry smiles from readers who recall those players and their reputations?).

"The referees are turning rugby into a game for sissies," was the way Du Preez put it and at the time I did not disagree with him. We had all seen Geldenhuys get away with some dastardly acts on the field which made a raking incident seem extremely petty by comparison.

But that was an era where the early season was always accompanied by a higher than usual media concentration on foul or dangerous play. It did appear in those days that newspapermen and other journalists targeted this as a talking point at stages of a season where there was little else to write about.

Long before I myself took up journalism, it used to amuse me how every year the press used to make out that the rugby was rougher, tougher, dirtier and more dangerous than it had ever been before.

As one of the first games I ever watched live was the tempestuous, brawl-a-minute clash between Natal and the All Blacks at King's Park in 1976, I always wondered what the writer was on about when he got all stuffy about the most recent incident of dirty play.

Maybe you are more impressionable when you are young, but the recollection of that 1976 series, apart from the bickering about the refereeing of Gert Bezuidenhout and Ian Gourlay, is of the punching and stamping that marred every match.

Peter Whiting had his ear almost completely seperated from the rest of his head by a Springbok boot and the late Barry Glasspool wrote a book about the tour which was titled "One in the Eye" and featured on its cover a photograph of an All Black front-row forward who almost lost an eye because of a punch aimed at him.

To my mind, as the game has got quicker so the incidents have been eradicated from the sport. Often when modern referees and touch-judges get all lathered up after a bit of jersey pulling and start flashing their yellow cards around the place I wonder what the same refs would have done had they officiated in some of the matches which were even more recent than 1976.

A match such as the Natal/NZ Cavaliers game in 1986, when referee Steve Strydom stood to one side while players from both sides laid into one another. Now that was a free-for-all if ever there was one.

Then there were those several other more callous incidents which were played over and over again on our television screens in the latter part of the 1980s and early part of the 1990s but which brooked little or no sanction against the culprits.

I forget what year it was, but there was one where Northerns lock Drikus Hattingh led with his boot when EP scrumhalf Craig Richardson tried to tackle him. On the televised evidence it was as deliberate as it was savage (there was a lot of blood afterwards and I think Richardson broke his jaw), as indeed was the kick with which the same Hattingh knocked out Waratahs lock Dick Langford in a Super 10 game.

Not that Hattingh was the only culprit. There were several incidents, many of them much worse than those already mentioned. When it came to the potential damage these could cause to opponents, they were not necessarily of greater gravity than the nibble that Johan le Roux took out of Sean Fitzpatrick's ear in Wellington in 1994, or for that matter the similar offence committed by Natal flank Wickus van Heerden four years later.

On both occasions the players in question were banned for 18 months and in both instances it was to prove the de facto end of their respective careers (Le Roux did play again, but never at the same level). At the time, I was one of the journalists who condoned the NZ decision to banish Le Roux from the game. At the time, there was a lot of emotion in the air, and the Kiwi media did make a meal of the incident. Now, nine years on and nine years wiser, I realise that Fitzpatrick was far from the last player to be bitten on the rugby field during a top class match.

There have been many times since then that players have, in the immediate aftermath of the battle, made such claims. Invariably they are then hushed up, frequently because there is no television evidence but also because the players know the seriousness with which the offence is regarded, at least in Australasia.

My question is this - what is there in a bite which merits an 18 month exclusion from the game, while a head-butt or kick in the head, which could crack skulls, break dentures and, like AIDS, even cause death, earns the culprit something between four and six weeks on the sidelines.

In the wake of the silly comments attributed to Taine Randell last week, perhaps the most intelligent words on the matter came from Supersport commentator Joel Stransky in Durban last Friday night: "They were both ugly incidents and few would have argued if both were banned for a year".

The incidents Stransky was referring to were the same ones I am alluding to here: The AJ Venter headbutt on Robbie Fleck, the Aisea Tuilevula knee-up which produced a flow of blood from the head of Friedrich Lombaard.

Randell is complaining about the extra two weeks that were slapped on his man by the SA Rugby judicial committee, yet if you were to ask myself and presumably Stransky what our gut-feeling was, we would say he should have been banished for longer, and so should Venter.

But then Highlanders coach Laurie Mains probably also made a good point when he said there will always be complaints from Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans when their players are suspended by disciplinary committees from other countries.

As with refereeing, all that the various parties should be asking for from the DC is consistency, which is patently not the case at the moment. Neither has it been in the past, either. In 1997 Cabous van der Westhuizen, the Sharks wing, was the victim of a charge by Auckland wing Joeli Vidiri that was as bad if not worse than anything I have seen on a rugby field. At the time the Natal players, many of whom had been part of the 1994 tour, asked that Vidiri be put under the same scrutiny as Johan le Roux had three years earlier.

The appeal fell on deaf ears and Vidiri escaped with what, in comparison to an 18 month ban, was no more than a slap on the wrist, if even that. Perhaps if there was an independent international body that tried these cases, we would all be less inclined to cry foul every time a ruling was made on the incidents which, in a contact sport like rugby, will not and cannot ever be eradicated completely.

Ultimately the guys who rule on the bite on the ear (Le Roux, Van Heerden) and the spear tackle (Hanyani Shimange) should be the same ones who rule on the kick in the face.