The Champions Cup Round of 16 playoffs were shaped to a farcical degree by red cards, yellow cards, high hits, late hits and shoulder charges. In the eight second leg matches there were five reds and fifteen yellows, and there should have been at least two more reds. That, by any measure, is a daft way for a sport to go about its business.

To put this in historical context it took 102 years of international rugby before an Irish player got sent off (Willie Duggan in 1977) and another 33 years for it to happen again when Jamie Heaslip kneed Richie McCaw in full view of the referee. 

At the 2003 World Cup there were no red cards handed out in the 48 games played, there were two at the 2007 tournament, one in 2011, and one in 2015. 

Then at the last World Cup in Japan there was a sudden jump to eight, and that has set the tone for what we’ve seen since.

World Rugby will argue that this increase shows they’re clamping down on dangerous play, but it also demonstrates that player behaviour isn’t really changing. The response to head collisions – HIA protocols, rest periods, the use of head injury experts – has been good, but the real job is to somehow stop players hitting each other in the head.

It used to require extreme violence carried out in broad daylight for a ref to send someone off. Duncan McRae went full Romper Stomper on Ronan O’Gara on the 2001 Lions Tour. A “contrite” McRae got a seven week ban and went on to play another five years of professional rugby. And Kevin Mealamu and Ma’a Nonu’s didn’t even get a yellow card for their Legion Of Doom move on Brian O’Driscoll during the 2005 Lions Tour.

But those incidents stick in the memory because we don’t often see blatant foul play like that anymore. These days players rarely lose the head because they don’t have the time, they’re too busy chasing the next play. 

While those O’Gara and O’Driscoll moments were more shocking to witness, they weren’t as insidious as modern day transgressions which are more intertwined in each phase of play and therefore trickier to eradicate.  

In the last few seasons, red cards are more often being brandished for timing and technique errors and foul play is usually a consequence of the sheer speed and complexity of the game. 

The second leg of the Sale V Bristol Champions Cup Round of 16 was a good example of this. Sale went down to 13 men at one stage, should have been down to 12, and even then continued to test the ref with more reckless hits. At almost every breakdown there was something he could have gone to the video ref on.

This pattern was repeated in most of the last 16 ties. Toulouse played 70 minutes of their first leg against Ulster with 14 men and would not be facing Munster this weekend were it not for Tom O’Toole’s red card in the return fixture. In the same game Rob Herring, Mike Lowry and Dimitri Delibes could all have been sent off had a stricter referee been in charge. 


Tom O’Toole of Ulster after being shown a red card during the Heineken Champions Cup match between Ulster and Toulouse at Kingspan Stadium in Belfast. Photo by Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

What makes players roll the dice on impact is partly down to discipline but also because of the complete lack of consistency from game to game and competition to competition. Bundee Aki escaped with a yellow for a head on head hit on Johnny Sexton, but maybe Bundee took his lead from the first leg when Jamison Gibson Park got just a yellow for a shoulder to head challenge on Kieran Marmion.

Meanwhile World Rugby aren’t exactly reading the room with their southern hemisphere Super Rugby 20 minute red card replacement trial, a move that has further emboldened those players who make a living out of big collisions.

The governing body are seemingly so insecure about the sport’s popularity that they continue to see red cards as the problem, rather than the actions that lead to red cards, and the motivations behind those actions. 

Some players are doing it because that’s what they’ve always done, some because their technique is not good enough, some because their reflexes are too slow, some because they enjoy the hit, and some because their coach has given them licence to do it. 

In the last round of the Champions Cup, Bordeaux-Begles number 8 Ma’ama Vaipulu put in a high and ridiculously late hit on La Rochelle’s Jonathan Danty. The ball was long gone so he had no impact on the play. Yet as Vaipulu, who had already got a red card in this season’s Champions Cup, walked off, he got a round of high fives from his teammates and a handshake from his coach Christophe Urios. Stone Age stuff.

There’s clearly still a niche market for red card machines like Vaipulu, the Argentinian hitman Tomas Lavanini and Stade Francais’ Australian hooker Tolo Latu, who keep getting signed by big clubs.

Second row Charlie Ewels, who was sent off just 82 seconds into the England V Ireland Six Nations game this year, doesn’t fall into that category. There was no malice in his tackle, just shocking technique and a player seemingly unaware of the consequences of his actions, as is clear from his reflections on the game.

“None of their lads or our lads said anything, it was when the replay went up ‘oh no my head has hit his head’. I saw the ref walking back with Courtney Lawes, he had his cards out and I thought ‘oh no yellow'”.

The tackle was late and so high that Ewels managed to hit 6ft 6in James Ryan flush in the head. It was one of the most clear cut reds of the season and yet the player himself was unaware that A) he had even hit someone head high and B) that a hit of that nature would result in a sending off.

Judging by his comments, Ewels was working off instinct and there’s clearly a certain percentage of players who fall back on old habits when stressed. The reality is those players will be soon weeded out of the game through natural selection.

Any logical player would look at the consequences of making a reckless tackle or clearout and make a promise to themselves to never do it again; you get a red, you get a ban, you might get dropped, you annoy your teammates, you jeopardise your own short and long term health, and you jeopardise your opponent’s health.

World Rugby brought in a framework for high tackles three years ago, which made it clear which actions warranted a sending off and which didn’t, but that framework seems to repeatedly slip the mind of refs and players. 

The sport has managed to almost fully eradicate spear tackles, dangerous collisions in the air, eye gouges and head-butts…yet has made no significant progress with high tackles.

Leicester Tigers, a club whose North Star used to be macho aggression, but are now led by one of the sharpest minds in English rugby, head coach Steve Borthwick, got red cards in both their knockout games against Clermont.  

Borthwick was asked about it and said his club are focused on coaching their players to tackle lower. “What we are trying to do is to make sure we’re coaching players to want to tackle low. By ingraining good habits at a young age it will filter through. That’s going to take time.”

Borthwick is a former teammate of 2003 World Cup winner Steve Thompson who at 42 years of age was diagnosed with early onset dementia and probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Thompson struggles with anxiety, severe mood swings, can’t remember winning the World Cup, often can’t remember his wife’s name and knows as bad as things are now, he will “only go downhill from here”. 

The lazy and usually unchallenged view is that collisions, and therefore head colliisons, are such a fundamental part of rugby that they can’t ever be fully removed from the game. Players know the risks, let them get on with it.

But players don’t actually know the risks because we still don’t know enough about concussion. And there is no single element that is “fundamental” to the game of rugby. The sport changes so often that it’s like Trigger’s old broom with so many new handles and new heads that it’s no longer the original broom. 

And if violence was rugby’s USP then surely it would have been completely overtaken by boxing, MMA or American Football, where fans can get a purer hit of the rough stuff.

Simon Hick is a Second Captains producer