Nigel Owens says that Craig Casey was correctly yellow-carded for his tackle on Lorenzo Cannone during the Six Nations clash at the Aviva Stadium.
The Ireland scrum-half spent 10 minutes in the sin-bin after he made head-on-head contact with the Azzurri number eight during the first half of Andy Farrell’s side’s 20-13 victory.
The incident sparked a debate online over the balance of sanctions against the tackler as many believed that Cannone dipped into the contact.
It was also claimed that Casey didn’t have much time to react to the dynamics of the carry from the Italian, particularly after Joe McCarthy made the initial contact with a leg tackle on the back-rower who was angling in-field.
“They’ll say that is his duty to get lower, but sometimes it shocks you when somebody steps back into you or whatever,” Ireland head coach Farrell said after the game.
“It needs cleaning up in my opinion, because you get a broken nose and you didn’t even know that it happened. It’s hard to take, isn’t it sometimes?”
Nigel Owens’ verdict
The optics certainly didn’t help with the smaller Casey coming off second-best in the contact and ultimately broke his nose.
Speaking on World Rugby’s Whistle Watch show, Owens says that the correct decision was reached by Hollie Davidson and her officiating team after TMO Ian Tempest notified the referee about the foul play.
“First of all, I think it was the correct decision,” said the ex-referee who officiated over 100 Test matches.
“When I was watching this, I was chuckling, probably the shortest man on the field and he’s managed to make head contact with a big guy here.
“What they’d look at here, is do you have head contact? Yes, you do. So the action is always upright. So that’s the first trigger for the referee. Now, if you’re upright and make a tackle, you’re not doing anything illegal unless you make contact with the head or the neck. In this instance, he does.”
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Owens agreed with the Foul Player Review Officer that a yellow card was a sufficient punishment, as the degree of danger for Cannone did not warrant an upgrade to a red card.
“Because it’s a very low degree of danger, it does reach the threshold of the yellow card for the bunker to have a look at it. And they deem that the actual contact and impact was very low degree of danger, because of that, then quite rightly so remained at the yellow card,” Owens explained.
“Some may well have argued that a penalty would have sufficed.”
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Just a rugby incident?
Former Wales and Lions winger Alex Cuthbert who joined Owens on the show, added: “Is it a bit of a rugby collision as well because of the height?”
“It is a penalty,” Owens replied.
“Some referees would have said, ‘I’ll stick with a penalty’ but a yellow card is certainly not incorrect. It’s certainly not more than that.”
“So, you got a yellow card and a broken nose as well,” Cuthbert concluded.