Disciplinary panels have entered silly season early
It’s disappointing that disciplinary issues keep distracting from the action in the Premiership. The season is coming nicely to the boil with fierce competition for the play-off and Champions Cup spots, but too much of the talk during the week was about the red card that didn’t happen in the Sale v Wasps match – which might yet have a real influence on the way the season pans out – and then the peculiar saga of Denny Solomona’s disciplinary hearing.
Sale’s match against Wasps at the AJ Bell was a real nail-biter, eventually won by the home side with a final-minute try. The result moved Sale up into sixth spot, and prevented Wasps from going third, so it really mattered.
Mike Haley basically cleared out Josh Bassett with a forearm smash. Had it been seen it would have been a red card, and a penalty to Wasps. Would that have affected the result? It’s impossible to tell, but Wasps would more than likely have had a lineout deep in Sale territory, rather than the restart being a 5m scrum that they had to defend, and which ultimately led to the winning try.
would have had a one-man advantage for the remaining three minutes of the game, and could have gone on to deny Sale even a losing bonus point. Most people would conclude that the decision probably had a material effect on the result.
It would be wrong to blame referee JP Doyle alone as there was a lot going on, but it happened right in front of one of his assistants who was about ten yards away. Even if the assistant missed it, Bassett was down for a while, and when he got up he looked distinctly groggy – why wasn’t this drawn to Doyle’s attention. Also, it’s the job of the TMO to spot these things, but he didn’t.
I try hard not to criticise refs, but I think that we have a real problem in the Premiership, which is a lack of sufficiently capable officials. The refs overall are pretty good, but far too often they’re being let down by their assistants and the TMO.
Nearly every weekend we see things being missed that really ought to have been spotted; in the Exeter v Gloucester televised match the commentator spotted a trip, as did plenty of television viewers, but not the TMO. That one would only have been a yellow card, so there couldn’t be a post-match citing, and Exeter were so much the better side that all it would have done was narrow the margin, but that’s hardly the point.
It’s essential that the problem is recognised, and action taken. In the short-to-medium term the answer is for more inci They dents to be subject to TMO review – that will annoy the traditionalists, but in a professional sport, where big bucks are involved, what matters is that we get the right result. Fans need to have confidence that the officials will make the right decisions, and every time something obvious is missed, it just does a little bit more to erode their confidence in them.
Moving to Solomona, when he received his fourweek ban for allegedly making a homophobic comment, that seemed like the end of the matter, but we then got sight of the paperwork from the RFU disciplinary hearing, and the whole matter became stranger and stranger.
First, it became clear that the player who was the target of the alleged remarks, Worcester’s Jamie Shillcock, had subsequently shaken Solomona’s hand, and was content for that to be the end of the matter. It was the RFU that wished to pursue things, and a key part of their case was that, although there was no audio evidence Solomona uttered the alleged words, they thought they could lip-read what he said. The panel rejected that, but still decided to find Solomona guilty!
To an observer this looks plain daft. The only evidence against the Sale winger was that Shillcock, who didn’t even want any further action, alleged that the same words Mathieu Bastareaud got banned for were used against him. The ref didn’t hear anything, nor did his assistant, so surely the only sensible option was to chuck out the charge? No, the panel decided, on the balance of probabilities, that the words had been said, and Solomona needed to be punished. If bans are to be handed out on the basis of one player’s say-so then we’re headed for big trouble.
Solomona got four weeks off despite the lack of any real evidence, and Haley got two weeks for striking Bassett with such force that the Wasps player seemingly lost some teeth. Who says actions speak louder than words?