Exeter’s Skinner and Ewers to miss play-off semi-final against Sale after bans
Exeter’s Sam Skinner and Dave Ewers will miss Saturday’s Premiership playoff semi-final against Sale after both players were handed four-week bans for dangerous tackles.
Skinner, Exeter’s Scotland forward, was sent off by the referee Karl Dickson in the 53rd minute for a high challenge on the diminutive Faf de Klerk during the Chiefs’ 20-19 fightback win against the Sharks. Back-rower Ewers was cited for a dangerous tackle on Simon Hammersley in the 33rd minute of the match at Sandy Park.
The ban means Skinner and Ewers
would miss the Premiership final at Twickenham Stadium on 26 June should Exeter prevail in the semi-final.
Both players contested the charges but they were upheld by the independent disciplinary panel in an online hearing on Tuesday evening.
In a statement, the panel said: “Both cases involved direct contact with an opponent’s head that carried a high degree of danger. None of the mitigating factors set out in the World Rugby Head Contact Process which would have justified the red card otherwise being reduced to a yellow card were present. Neither player accepted the charge and so full mitigation credit was not available to them.”
Asked for his reaction at his weekly media conference, Exeter’s rugby director Rob Baxter said: “I am very disappointed. If I am honest, I am struggling with the whole process and everything about it a little bit. There is a huge amount of inconsistency, a lack of empathy for the players involved in the incidents.
“I definitely think it is getting to the stage that it is something that the players who are currently playing the game need to have, or need to decide through the RPA [Rugby Players’ Association] on how they are going to do it, have a lot more input on how the whole process around making the laws, how they are refereed, cited etc.
“If you ask a lot of the players who are playing now, I don’t think they would agree with what is currently happening.”
Baxter continued: “Everyone has got a responsibility to tackle lower and safely - it is written in stone, we are all aware of it - but rugby is an incredibly dynamic game with a lot of moving parts.
“Sometimes it just feels like where is the empathy, or the understanding of, that mechanism of moving parts, understanding how players move around the field? What is the genuine expectation of what is happening in a game of rugby?”