Dylan Hartley in a jam again, the headlines might have read this week after the England captain was invited to tread a familiar path and plod to a disciplinary hearing to answer a charge of foul play.
Indeed, on Wednesday, when Hartley was cleared of striking an opponent’s face, Northampton were indignant, insisting the citing, a result of reputation rather than the seriousness of the incident, should never have been brought.
The notion that Hartley’s citing shows he is a victim of his past behaviour is tempting but unlikely because the issue is wider than one player. The citing raises serious concerns about the disciplinary process which threatens to undermine the referee’s decision and the players’ relationship with him.
Hartley’s latest indiscretion was allegedly striking the face of the Clermont Auvergne prop Rabah Slimani as he entered a ruck during Northampton’s European Champions Cup match there on Saturday.
He had not been looking to clear out the France international, who had tackled Courtney Lawes and was on the floor, but the second row Sitaleki Timani, who was trying to steal the ball.
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As Hartley went off his feet and missed Timani, his trailing right arm caught Slimani in the face and the prop was treated for a bleeding nose. There was no intent but, having gone off his feet, there was no control from Hartley either and having caused an injury he was liable to be sanctioned.
The referee, Ben Whitehouse, sent Hartley to the sin-bin for recklessness, which seemed the maximum the offence merited. As a senior player, Northampton’s captain and someone who has spent 60 weeks of his career serving suspensions, Hartley should have known better and having caused an injury to an opponent’s face, he put himself in a familiar position.
It seems the disciplinary process has become two-tone. Crackdowns on various acts of foul play usually result in an initial flurry of red cards before referees reserve the sanction for the most severe offences and leave it up to citing commissioners and disciplinary panels to decide whether an act of foul play was worthy of a dismissal.
Had Hartley been judged on form, Whitehouse would have sent him off. He found himself in a familiar place on Wednesday because he caught an opponent in the face at a time when World Rugby’s headline policy is player safety, led by concussion.
That means ensuring players who are concussed are diagnosed quickly and not allowed to return to the field but also minimising risk. Part of the latter policy has been to collar players who, whether by design or accident, make contact with the head. The spray of red cards last season was designed to have a deterrent effect and there was an improvement in tackling technique, at least when it came to the safety of the ball-carrier; tacklers are still getting hurt in large numbers by putting their head in the wrong position.
It was on welfare grounds, not reputation, that Hartley was cited, although how Slimani was not asked to account for his shoulder charge towards Hartley’s head later in the match was hard to understand in the context of what World Rugby is trying to achieve. There was no contact because the Northampton man saw him coming, but it was an act that appeared to be armed with more intent than Hartley’s own, which is why Slimani should have been asked what was going through his mind as only he can explain it.
The question Hartley’s citing raises, and it was the same with Chris Ashton when he received 10 weeks for making contact close to the eyes of an opponent while playing for Saracens against Ulster at the start of 2016, is the authority of the referee.
In each case, and many others in between, the referee looked at a replay of the incident before making his decision, a yellow card for Hartley and merely a penalty against Ashton. Match officials have more feel for a game than three disciplinary panel members sitting in a room watching an incident played over from various angles, in slow motion as well as real time.
Players and coaches deal with referees, not suits sitting in hotel conference suites. An incident missed by the match officials, and there are not many with one sitting in a television van and so seeing more than the referee and touch judges, is one thing, but one that has been reviewed and acted on is another.
Which is not to say there are occasions when a yellow card has been unduly lenient but if referees are to be undermined to the point when the final say on what happens on the field is passed into the hands of a body which has a legal rather than a rugby bent, it creates a disconnect between players and coaches on the one hand and the authorities on the other. At the very least, referees should be asked to review an incident again, from all the angles available, and asked whether they stand by their decisions before a citing is made.
The safety aspect cannot be downplayed, but as Hartley’s opposite number last weekend, Benjamin Kayser said, a red card should be applied for serious offences, ones which either cause a player harm or were so reckless as to make that outcome more probable than possible, otherwise matches would end up five-a-side. Players know when someone is taking a cheap shot.
The system has in effect created an orange card, an offence that a referee deems is worthy of no more than a yellow but which judicial officers, applying the letter of the law, consider to merit a red. Suspensions this season have tended to be on the light side, usually coming in at the lowest entry point, the deterrent not in the length of the punishment but being called out.
Player welfare is important and suspect technique and habits need to be corrected but the red card test is failing players and referees, whose decisions have become more half-time than final whistle.
• This is an extract taken from the Breakdown, the Guardian’s weekly rugby union email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.