PETER JACKSON
THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW
Jordie Barrett raises his outstretched right boot high above the ground and the upended studs strike Marika Koroibete on the head. After due diligence, referee Damon Murphy sends the youngest of the Barrett boys off.
All Black cries of ‘foul' could be heard half a world away. Sir John Kirwan called it ‘ridiculous'. Barrett never meant any harm, no doubt true but it is also true that the law which he appeared to break makes no distinction between the unintentional and the deliberate.
Then there was the fatuous claim that it was all a load of hogwash because Koroibete hadn't been injured, as if that somehow made a boot to the head acceptable. The fact that it could have caused extensive damage was never mentioned, least of all by Barrett's legal team.
New Zealand defence coach Scott McLeod went as far as to suggest that it was all Koroibete's fault. He had, said McLeod, ‘encroached' into Barrett's landing space, as if the Wallaby wing should have stepped aside and given his opponent a clear run instead of waiting for him to come back down.
At one stage Koroibete could have been forgiven had he wondered whether the incident would be flipped, that he would end up in the dock, accused of butting Barrett's boot!
Law 9:11 states: “Players must not do anything that is reckless or dangerous to others.''
Having consulted the TMO (Brett Cronan) and his two assistant referees (Jordan Way and Graham Cooper), Murphy came to the conclusion that Barrett had done something reckless, however unintentionally.
An incident of striking similarity happened some six months earlier, during Leinster's home PRO14 win over Glasgow Warriors on February 28. Referee Frank Murphy sent Adam Hastings off for doing to Leinster wing Cian Kelleher what Barrett did to Koriobete in Perth last weekend.
Murphy, the former Munster and Leicester Tigers scrum-half, told Hastings: “You've caught the ball. You've raised your foot. Your studs have gone into his face. It's dangerous play. It's going to be a red card.''
The same could have applied, word for word, to Barrett last weekend.
Judicial officer Owain Rhys James, a Cardiff barrister, found Hastings guilty of an offence which carries a minimum six-week suspension. Several mitigating factors, not least Hastings' guilty plea, halved the ban, still long enough to eliminate the Scot from the last two rounds of the Six Nations. Another incident of striking similarity had taken place the previous season in the English Premiership towards the end of Sale's home win over Wasps on November 8, 2019. The same ingredients were all there –a high ball, a leaping catch, an outstretched leg, an accidental boot to the head.
Referee Tom Foley gave Paolo Odogwu a red card for striking Sale's Rohan Jense van Rensburg on the head. The disciplinary panel, in the words of its chairman, Daniel White, a specialist sports lawyer, agreed that Odogowu did not intentionally aim to make contact with the Sale player's face.
They found that he ‘did intend to use his outstretched leg to fend off a potential oncoming player and was reckless as to whether or not it made contact or caused injury. In this case a dangerous action of the player resulted in a minor injury to the Sale player'.
“What kind of a sport decides the only man to blame is the referee?”
Odogwu, 24, got six weeks, his ‘disre- spectful behaviour' towards the referee having cost him any deduction.
The PRO14 and Premiership sang from the same hymnal while acting independently. The tribunal assigned to the Barrett case on behalf of SAN-
ZAAR, organisers of the Rugby Championship, played a very different tune in reaching their judgement, one which would have left the Hurricane jigging with delight.
Robert Stelzner, a Cape Town lawyer, former Springbok centre De Wet Barry and the retired Argentinian referee Jose Luis Rolandi came to the conclusion that Barrett had acted neither recklessly nor dangerously.
At their Dublin headquarters, World Rugby will have been pulling their collective hair all week, unable to erase the image of Barrett's boot smashing into Koroibete's head. The video prompts an alarming question:
What kind of a sport is it that examines this sort of incident and decides the only man to blame is the referee?
They, of course, are used to being hung out to dry but nobody has ever been hung out like poor old Damon Murphy. And for what? For applying the sanction as required by World Rugby, especially when blows to the head are the hottest of hot potatoes.
The panel went beyond ruling that ‘there was no intentional nor reckless act of dangerous play'. They decreed that the red card be ‘expunged from the player's record'.
Imagine how Mr Murphy felt about that. Not even a miserable word of comfort about the difficulty of handling an incident which no less a referee than Nigel Owens believed worthy of a red card.
The law makes no allowance for the accidental, as all those sent off for mistiming their arrival in the aerial contest will testify. But a study of the few seconds between Barrett catching the ball, unchallenged, and his boot hitting Koroibete, begs a question: Why at that point had his right foot been raised into a position virtually perpendicular to the ground?
The next time a referee is confronted with circumstances identical to last Sunday's in Perth, he may think of Murphy and wonder whether a red card is worth the hassle. How can World Rugby assure them that is their duty to do so when a disciplinary panel acting under their auspices decides otherwise?
