Former All Blacks scrumhalf Justin Marshall has slammed World Rugby for failing to implement the 20-minute red-card law globally.
The law allows a team to replace a red-carded player with another player after 20 minutes, which sees the player – but not the team – punished.
While the trial was quickly adopted by Super Rugby Pacific and also used in last year’s Rugby Championship, it has been met with resistance in Europe and is therefore yet to get the green light from World Rugby.
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This has infuriated Marshall, who didn’t hold back during a GBRANZ podcast.
“Why are World Rugby not listening?” he asked.
“The red card one, who’s arguing it? The way that head safety is being so well looked after now. To a degree, sometimes it’s gone too far with the TMO coming into the game on a regular basis – the players haven’t ever been more protected,” he said .
“I can categorically say that nobody out there, particularly professional players, have any intention of attacking the head – they are not doing it.
“The ramifications of doing it are so severe, so anything that’s happening is just a timing of an accidental collision, where it’s just been head-on-head. It’s been no one’s fault and it’s been really well governed.
“What we’ve got to then do is protect the game. People are going to spend a s**tload of money to come from the UK to come and watch this [British & Irish Lions] series and, if we get two red cards in the first 10 minutes of the first two Test matches, and even the third heaven forbid, because we can’t get our head around the fact that we can penalise that player.
“It’s 20 minutes that a team’s got to cope, where the other team have a massive advantage, and then that player is out of the game. He has been punished and then he will get punished afterwards.
“If you’re going to say: ‘It will go unpunished’, he will be punished, the team’s been punished but the game has only been punished for 20 minutes.
“For f**k sake, can’t we just see common sense?
“I think what they feel they are actually doing is protecting the game, whereas they’re not. They’re ruining the game.”
Photo: Shaun Roy/Sportsfile via Getty Images
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