London, England- This weekend saw two high profile red cards. One that came in the first 73 seconds of the game, and one that was in the South Africa vs New Zealand match. Red cards are rarely seen in international matches, and this one absolutely shouldn’t have been shown. However, it happened and now we must digest what we can learn from it. Welcome to another issue of the Ref Zone.
Let’s go with probably one the most uncontroversial red decisions I’ve seen in a long time:
Deliberate, Dangerous, Reckless, Careless, any other words we ought to throw in there? No debate straight Red Card.
Now on to the more interesting of cards, the second comes as a double yellow, in the Springboks vs All Blacks game, have a look at the first one:
https://youtu.be/WJJeqAmEV3I
It should never have been a yellow card. What criteria does it meet? In this case the iRB have come back and said that it was in fact wrong to have yellow carded.
https://youtu.be/F4JsFZQBjcE
The second yellow card is a bit more solid. Personally I think it’s a fairly soft yellow, one that probably a penalty could have just dealt with, however, with how this game was going a yellow card is completely understandable.
How do you feel about the cards?
