Matt Williams: Time to refine current red card laws in the interests of rugby justice

Like all high-functioning communities, rugby has laws, not rules. These laws are based on the principle that our officiating and judicial system will act justly.

The more egregious the offence, the more stern the punishment. It is a system that requires both logic, balance and wisdom.

Currently, when contact is made with another player’s head, no consideration is given to whether the contact was accidental or premeditated. All head contact receives the bluntness of a red card.

The joy of playing and watching rugby is that our attacking players are moving at high speed, in a chaotic unpredictable environment, making split-second decisions centimetres before making contact with an opposition player, who is attempting to physically take them to the ground, while functioning in the same chaotic state.

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In that environment, accidents will happen.

The red card handed to New Zealand’s captain Sam Kane during the RWC 2023 Final was the perfect example of an accidental collision. Kane was chasing South Africa’s Jessie Kriel, when Kriel unexpectedly and brilliantly changed direction in searching for a gap.

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Kriel’s split second brilliance robbed Kane of three metres of space and he simply did not have time to adjust. When he collided with Kriel he accidentally made contact with the ball carrier’s head. The match officials acted in accordance with the laws as they currently stand. Kane was yellow carded, and this was subsequently upgraded to a red. However, many in the rugby community believe that while the laws were correctly enforced, justice was not done.

When I first played our game there were only two sanctions – a penalty and a sending off. There were no free kicks or coloured cards.

For more than a century it was an exceptionally rare and shameful occurrence for an international player to be sent from the field because it was usually for an act of real violence.

As our game evolved, administrators began to realise that rugby’s complex set of laws required more nuance to the sanctions to deliver justice. That generation of exceptionally wise administrators introduced the free kick as a lesser sanction to a penalty, for all technical scrum infringements.

Unlike the injustices we witnessed at the recent World Cup, where technical scrum infringements resulted in penalties that ultimately determined the world champions, in the past, under those just and now wrongly-jettisoned laws, teams could not score points from forcing technical scrum infringements.

With the growth of what is now termed “professional fouls”, and what we use to simply call cheating, the yellow card was conceived to boot some justice into the backsides of those who constantly and deliberately broke the laws.

The motivation for all of these changes to sanctions was aimed at delivering justice to our players, spectators and supporters.

World Rugby will soon consider a proposal to globally trial a law variation on red cards that in many people’s opinion, including mine, have been successfully implemented in Super Rugby. This law variation aims to refine the current red card laws and deliver justice in our high-velocity contact sport that is desperately and correctly attempting to reduce concussions.

Let us be totally clear. The proposed laws in no way minimise the game’s commitment to reducing illegal contact to player’s heads. What the proposed law trial does provide is nuance for officials to rule if a player made accidental contact to another player’s head. If so, the offending player will still be sent from the field and cannot return. The refining piece of legislation is that after 20 minutes of being a player down their team can replace the offender. Any coach will tell you these remain large sanctions. If this law was in use at RWC 2023 Sam Kane would have remained off the field but the Kiwis could have sent on a bench player 20 minutes after the incident.

Crucially the trial law provides justice to the game, because every player who has ever laced up a boot understands that there is a huge difference between reckless, deliberate or dangerous body contact and accidents when players simply get their time and space wrong.

Importantly, the law also nullifies the ridiculous time wasting that forces our referees to tediously watch replays of incidents before making huge, game-changing decisions. Instead, the proposed law variation provides the TMO, who does not have the pressure of being on the field, with the time to review the evidence and make an informed decision.

Our refereeing community does not like the concept of empowering TMOs to make decisions without the input of the on-field referee. While I understand their concerns, we only have to look at how Rugby League uses its version of the TMO to make highly-accurate decisions much faster than rugby, to see that our officiating must evolve faster in that direction.

While rugby’s laws must change to rid itself of the stigma that the game causes brain injury, there are several other far more crucial areas of law than the proposed red card variation that must be changed to accomplish this mammoth task.

The results of the laws being trialled in New Zealand that enforce all contact in tackles to be below the sternum are proving highly positive. As statistics show that concussions have drastically dropped under what is being called “the Sternum law”, we can predict these laws will be universal at some point in the near future.

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Reform is also essential as to how replacements are utilised to ensure aerobic fatigue returns to our forwards, so there are fewer high-speed collisions from fresh giants being sprung from the bench and the concept of the horrendously titled “Bomb Squad” is banished from the game.

All red cards need to be supported with far longer periods of suspension and the introduction of hefty fines on individual offenders to increase the deterrent. Practices that has been successfully implemented in both Rugby League and AFL.

Before RWC 2019, World Rugby’s legislators acted with good intentions but great haste in changing the red card laws regarding contact to the head in an attempt to reinforce player safety. These proposed law variations from Super Rugby are about refining those decisions that, under the law of unintended consequences, have pushed rugby’s scales of justice out of balance.