Chris Laidlaw: Punishments a judicial farce

Drew Mitchell is shown the red card. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

It's nice to know Robbie Deans still has a sense of humour.

His quip "nobody has played the All Blacks with 15 men so we are looking forward to trying it" was a barely disguised plea for some rationality when it comes to rugby's ramshackle punishment practices.

Drew Mitchell's dismissal last Saturday shut the Wallabies down at a time when they weren't that far behind and were starting to fire. It wrecked what was otherwise a spectacle of the highest class.

Many Australians have had enough of rugby's eccentric disciplinary system. So have many of us on this side of the Tasman, and in Europe and in South Africa, and everywhere.

Sin binning has now become a very irritating diversion. The fans certainly don't want it. They want a proper contest.

It doesn't seem to have any real impact on player behaviour largely because most yellow card offences are unconsciously committed in the heat of the moment and many are the product of confusion over the rules.

To red card a player for flicking the ball out of another's hand, as Mitchell did in Melbourne, is the ultimate mockery of a system that has locked itself up in a straitjacket.

When one compares Mitchell's two trifling misdemeanours with the calculated malice of Bakkies Botha a couple of weeks earlier, it shows just how arbitrary the disciplinary regime is. For Botha, it seems, cards of whatever hue are like badges of honour.

But it isn't just the card system that's faulty. On top of all this sits rugby's cumbersome judicial processes.

Let's face it, the game's judicial machinery has become a pretentious farce.

Rugby has fallen into the same trap as other professional sports and allowed itself to be persuaded that it must have all the legal trappings if it is to be taken seriously as a sport.

It is as if the game, not trusting its own capacity to be self-regulating, and fearful of being made to look unprofessional, has turned in desperation to the law and let the law get on top of it.

Those who transgress are hauled before the judiciary in a manner more befitting the Spanish Inquisition. Punishments are handed down with all the gravitas of a Supreme Court with stern faces all-round and suitably scripted admissions of remorse by the transgressors, penned delicately by legal counsel and read out to the general disbelief of anybody listening.

Remember when, last year, Dan Carter tackled a Welshman marginally high around the shoulders.

Neither the referee nor his assistants, all of whom unquestionably saw the incident, were moved to punish Carter. The player wasn't injured. That should have been the end of the matter, but no.

Carter was cited by some busy-body official with that power after the match and obliged to fly from Milan to London for a hearing in the company of an eminent English QC and was given a one match suspension. It was a complete waste of everybody's time and the game's precious money.

Its time to introduce a "report" system, as used in rugby league. The referee doesn't need to take up unnecessary time in singling out a player, delivering the customary lecture which nobody takes any notice of, then dismiss the miscreant - invariably skewing the result of the match.

It is scarcely justice to penalise a whole team for the indiscretion of a single individual. That is the equivalent of arresting a whole team because one member gets drunk and misbehaves at a nightclub. It isn't fair and it isn't smart.

On the other hand, docking the pay of the player who transgresses after the event is a more sensibly targeted way of inducing behaviour change.

Perhaps all this current fuss over punishments and crimes being out of kilter will bring about a realisation that the present system is nonsensical and needs review.