At a glance
Crusaders 24
The key word is
And Bridge’s hand certainly swats at the ball rather than trying to force it to ground.
Play was restarted with a goalline dropout, but had the officials deemed Bridge’s actions deliberate, the Chiefs – behind 15-10 at that stage – would have had a penalty five metres from the tryline.
If a player is not in a realistic position to gather the ball, there is contact and their opponent
– Yellow card If a player is not in a realistic position to gather the ball, there is
(Sevu Reece, Will Jordan tries; Richie Mo’unga con, 3 pen, drop goal) (Damian Mckenzie try; 2 pen, con). 15-10.
Had he landed on his head, Taylor would have seen red.
The Crusaders wing was also off to the sin bin, after Chiefs skipper Brad Weber successfully applied his captain’s challenge for Reece’s high tackle on replacement fullback Chase Tiatia. Eventually, O’keeffe seemed to reach the right decision, though the advice from Pickerill upstairs was questionable.
Wanting a tip on where Reece’s first point of contact was – direct to the head or whether it started lower and slipped up – O’keeffe was told by Pickerill it was direct, despite replays suggesting it indeed started more around the chest area.
This is key because for high tackles referees are instructed to followworld Rugby’s ‘Head Contact Process’, updated in March this year.
They are told to ask themselves if there was either a ‘high’ or ‘low’ degree of danger, with ‘high’ meeting the red-card threshold (before any mitigating factors can lower to a yellow card) and ‘low’ meeting a yellow card threshold (before any mitigation) or penalty kick.
‘Direct contact’ is one of the trigger words on a non-exhaustive list World Rugby provide for match officials to determine howmuch a player was at fault, and it falls under the ‘high’ degree of danger (red card) banner.
But despite Pickerill telling the on-field officials more than once that there was direct contact, O’keeffe was prepared to stack up the rest of the evidence, and indeed under the new simplified ‘Head Contact Process’ it does allow refs more leeway on judgement calls.
O’keeffe didn’t come up with specific mitigating factors (such as a sudden drop in body height by the ball carrier) to drop the sanction a level, however he did feel ‘‘the danger’s not extreme, because he’s flat-footed when he makes the tackle’’, so it seemed to meet more of the ‘low’ danger trigger words (such as ‘low force’) than ‘high’ ones.
And that meant the yellow card seemed the right call.
Chiefs 13
HT: