20-minute reds will add more confusion

LIKE most of Woody Allen's great lines, it was meant as a joke. “I was thrown out of college for cheating in the metaphysics exam,” he said in the 1977 classic Annie Hall. “I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

Only rugby's governing class could fail to see the funny side and take it seriously instead. By asking match officials to know the unknowable and decide the undecidable, they have, at a single stroke, made it more difficult to run a top-end game of union than it is to prove the existence of the afterlife. Which is some achievement, you will agree.

When it comes to dishing out red and yellow cards in the southern hemisphere, it is now down to the referee and his colleagues to establish the intent of a player committing a serious offence. If, for example, they think there was a sufficient whiff of malice aforethought about a high-danger, shoulderto-head tackle, the perpetrator will continue to receive the maximum sanction. If not, we will be in “20-minute red card” territory.

How in hell, you may reasonably ask, can such a judgement be made? Luke Pearce is Luke Pearce, not Sigmund bloody Freud. Will he be expected to ask the culprit if his vaporisation of an opponent was deliberate? If so, will he receive an open and honest admission of guilt? Fat chance. You can just hear some hulking great Springbok flanker saying: “Dead right I meant it. He's be getting on my nerves all match.”

Once again, the lawmakers have turned black-and-white into grey and created the conditions for more confusion and controversy. Which is pretty much the last thing the game needs as it continues to fight for its place in the shop window of international sport.