The Stormers leadership must appeal Neethling Fouche’s conviction of foul play and a lengthy ban. Fouche should never have been red-carded last weekend against Ulster, let alone be found guilty and sentenced.
An all-Welsh disciplinary panel — in the guise of supposed independence — were unanimous in throwing the book at Fouche, a player with an exemplary record when it comes to foul play.
He plays the game hard, but he does so without any malice or intent to deliberately and illegally hurt an opponent. He has played 77 matches in the last four seasons and his only blemish was a yellow card technical infringement.
For those who did not see the sending off, the question at the time was how else could Fouche have made the tackle? He was a second tackler to an attacker who had dipped his body height dramatically, dropped his head knowing the potential of a resulting head clash and, when tackled, was halfway to the ground.
If Fouche had gone any lower in the tackle, he’d have eaten a mouthful of a 4-G pitch.
The URC, as a competition, is a quality league, but the match officiating continues to betray the player quality.
This was a rugby accident, the head clash being incidental in the context of the attacking player's actions and, in a rugby world free of sanitisation, it would have simply been “play on”.
The referee — witnessing the action in real time — did not deem it sufficient for a penalty. The Television Match Official’s interjection turned the act into a red-card sending off, with the visuals slowed to an almost freeze frame to accentuate the point of head-on-head contact.
This is an injustice and the disciplinary verdict screams of bias.
The accidental head clash in rugby is a contentious issue and usually it is a rugby accident, in what is a collision and contact sport. Unfortunately, the defender cops everything and the ball carrier is protected of any wrongdoing, even if the ball carrier has dropped in height, propelled the head forward to the point of contact and changed direction.
It doesn’t matter if the ball carrier technically does everything wrong going into contact, if his head touches any part of the tackler, it is the latter who gets marched. CRAZY!
Any such incident doesn’t happen in slow motion, let alone super slow, freeze-frame type motion.
So many players are being done wrong in getting carded and banned. In Fouche’s case, he was done a proper dirty by a disciplinary committee that refused to entertain the rugby incident in totality and looked specifically at a point of contact and applied a dubious interpretation of the tackle law to give the player the maximum penalty under foul play.
The notion that Fouche could be charged with foul play, let alone convicted and banned for six weeks, is ridiculous. The suspension was reduced to four matches, which is the last four Stormers United Rugby Championship league matches, all to be played at home in Cape Town.
The reduction of two weeks was based on Fouche’s record, which is devoid of foul play incidents. Ordinarily, it would have been reduced even further if the player had pleaded guilty and agreed to the nonsense protocol of attending a “tackle school” class.
Most players agree to this kind of crazy because of the one-sided nature of these disciplinaries, but Fouche, true to his character and moral fibre, refused to plead guilty to a foul-play charge he had not committed.
There must be an appeal, because verdicts like these can’t go unchallenged. There must be a consequence to such prejudice.
The URC, as a competition, is a quality league, but the match officiating continues to betray the player quality. Too often the match officials have been exposed for getting it wrong, and while they remain a protected species, the same cannot apply to those who get it wrong when sitting on disciplinary committees.
There must be recourse for Fouche, as there must be for any player in his situation.
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