Rassie on the Kriel hit:
REACTION: South Africa's Director of Rugby Rassie Erasmus has come out in defence of veteran centre Jesse Kriel, in the wake of the fall-out in the United Kingdom media over a reported head clash.
rugby365.com
Second angle looks significantly less bad than the one all the screenshots are coming from (embedded video in the link, it shows the first angle, then the Curry hit, then the second angle). It's definitely secondary contact rising up from making contact with the ball as Rassie said, but I'm really not sure what the law says on this.
I know I'm a Saffa so not going to comment further on it. But intrigued on the view of others with that second angle.
@Cruz_del_Sur , thoughts?
Neutral in this.
For me, the second is better because it doesn't show head to head contact, because the camera's on the wrong side. Not showing foul play always looks better than showing foul play.
For me, I could always tell that there was collision with the ball between the players, that amount of bounce simple doesn't happen without some form of compression-release between the players - but that's me, can't comment on other people's opinions.
From the first angle, we know that head on head contact happened, and that there was a reasonable degree of force, and the the tackle was entered into with force.
From the text "Not that I have to educate you on this, but we all know that if it isn't direct head contact – which it wasn't, because he made contact on the ball and then moved up after he tackled on the ball – then it is not an issue." to the best of my knowledge, that's what we call gaslighting. Its not true, it's a lie, and one that's aimed to have us all believing Rassie over the evidence of the last few years and the written law.
"Direct head contact" = one head hits another head =/= first contact is between heads.
The debate is the colour of the card, not whether it was a legal tackle or otherwise. In the WR framework we' going down route 3. There is a very fall for the final point noted for potential mitigation (contact is indirect), but that's mitigation of sanction, not legality.
FTR, SA were well deserved winners, and I suspect would still have won, even had the card been red (I suspect that a TMO would have seen that as a starting point of red, mitigated down to yellow, based on the initial contact)
. The correct answer for Kriel is get lower so we don't have these issues. If he gets cited and is out for three weeks (or whatever it is) then so be it.
