Did this rugby player deserve to get punched for this cheap shot?

[WhiteSteve]

I’m not wicked familiar with the rules of rugby, so I’m just guessing here...

So the way I saw it, the bigger guy came in and took a shot on a defenseless smaller player, he had clear intent leading with his forearm. However, based on the guy’s immediate reaction after knocking the other player down, I saw immediate remorse, I’m thinking because he hit him higher than intended, landing the blow on his jaw instead of the upper chest area. You can see he begins to reach at the fallen player out of concern, but he’s immediately taken to task by the guy’s teammates, and from there he just got tied up and rocked cleanly to sleep.

So my big sport was always American football. And I’ve recently taken up ice hockey, but I’ve been a fan of it, especially the violent and self-policing aspect of it, for the majority of my life. As far as the football can be applied, as a former defensive player, I know how easily you can hit someone off-target at game speed. In our game you see penalties and even ejections nowadays, for helmet-to-helmet blows. Depending on the level you’re playing at, like college for example, you can be ejected even for accidental blows to the head, it’s an automatic penalty called “targeting.” The professional league will have a judgement call of intent by the referees, with slow motion replay. So I say all that to say there are instances (and a lot of complaints from defensive players as the rules evolve more and more to prevent concussions) where the defender is trying to hit the ball carrier shoulder-to-chest, but in a split second of unanticipated movement or inadjustable trajectory, that can become a shoulder-to-helmet or helmet-to-helmet hit.

Here is one of the more egregious violations, particularly due to the defenselessness of the receiver (that player #55 in black & orange is notorious for supposedly dirty hits, I love him though, guy is a lunatic and a freight train, he can drink from my canteen any day, lmao). But you can see in the immediate aftermath he runs up to his coach and mimics what he thought his hit was going to be like, shoulder-to-chest.https://www.youtube.com/embed/o8iFSP_S5h8 He was suspended for a long time for that hit, and again later for another bad one. So I say all that to say, by American football standards, that blow to the head was illegal, possibly an ejectable offense depending on play level, but also very arguably not intended to be as devastating as it turned out to be.

Meanwhile, to tie hockey into this, the way his teammates went after the guy was very hockey-like, self-policed. They didn’t wait for the ref to call a penalty, they just went up and made the guy answer for, at best, a careless move, and at worst, a cheap shot. You’ll see that in hockey a lot, particularly the pros where fighting is somewhat permitted and only penalized by taking the combatants off the ice for 5 minutes of play time. Certain players are obviously better at fighting than others, and there are “enforcers” who often are somewhat deficient in their skills, but they’re valuable for protection of their teammates, the highly skilled star players in particular. You’ve probably heard of Wayne Gretzky before, I’d imagine, arguably the best hockey player of all time. That dude was like 185 lbs soaking wet and couldn’t fight a lick... so two guys, Dave Semenko and Marty McSorley, over the course of Gretzky’s career, cut a living for themselves by basically being out there with him or just a coach’s shoulder tap away on the bench from beating the shit out of anyone who tried to lay out Gretzky with a big hit. And in the case of hockey, sometimes it’s angry and emotional, but other times, it’s just business. Sometimes a guy will demolish some guy with a hit, even a clean hit, and he immediately turns around and looks ready to have to fight one of the guy’s teammates coming to his defense. It’s basically just keeping people honest, in a moment like that, it might just be the closest teammate, not the toughest one. Like at 3:20 of this video of mic’d up players, you see the guy going after the guy, and he just casually says “we gotta go, bud”, obviously in response to a big hit just beforehand (I’ve seen the full video before, can’t find it today), just like “ok man, nothing personal, but you know how this works.” And you’ll even see at the end of other fights on there, the guys fall to the ice and are patting each other on the head like “nice job, man”, there’s usually a respect and understanding there.https://www.youtube.com/embed/R3VMy0DAuX4Here’s the man himself on the role of enforcer...https://www.youtube.com/embed/BjuaZQUq2iwSo after that whole diatribe, lmao, I’d say I need to know if rugby rules and unspoken codes are similar to football, if you can hit a guy after the ball is released and for how long after, and I’d say the response by the teammates overall was very hockey-like, closest guy takes on the offender and it’ll probably just cause a huge scrum. My overall uneducated answer is it was a sort-of-cheap shot that unintentionally became even cheaper, and the guy got more than what his intent deserved, but it’s all fair in terms of what actually happened. Hit a guy in the face, you’re probably going to get hit in yours in response.

[Tyrael]

Absolutely. And they both got sent off so fair is fair

[alexander_the_gr8]

No... he should have been kicked from the game.