The cup is coming home

10 January 2009 - Let’s make one thing clear - there were no mitigating circumstances and no excuses, despite the offending player’s risible claims. When we’re talking spear tackles there can be no defence.

Anyone who has played the game will understand a spear tackle – at least one in which the tackled player is dropped from the air – cannot be an accident.

So when Leicester scrum-half Harry Ellis was suspended for six weeks by an independent disciplinary committee for a dangerous tackle on Perpignan's All Blacks stand-off half Dan Carter, he got what he deserved.

For many of the thousands who watched the incident, it must have brought back terrible memories of the spear tackle on British and Irish Lions skipper Brian O’Driscoll by All Blacks Keven Mealamu and Tana Umaga in the first test in Christchurch in 2005.

On that occasion, O’Driscoll’s resultant shoulder injury put him out of the tour – a blight forever on Umaga’s hitherto admirable reputation for sportsmanship.

To New Zealand rugby’s great shame back then, no-one admitted culpability – or issued much sympathy – a sound of silence that still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of Irish (especially) and Lions’ supporters around the globe.

Perhaps some of them gained some grim satisfaction in the fact that it was an All Black – every bit as iconic to his team as O’Driscoll was to his – on the receiving end this time.

Certainly there was barely a squeak out of New Zealand rugby supporters over the outrageous Ellis tackle.

But here’s the thing – there should have been. Such tackles have no place in the game. There are already too many young men left permanently paralysed by rugby injuries, most of them admittedly due to scrummaging accidents, to allow any tragedies through wilful violence.

So when the Leicester Tigers claimed Ellis’s action was a "clumsy" rather than malicious tackle, they deserve as much contempt as the New Zealand silence engendered back in 2005.

Simon Cohen, Leicester's Head of Operations, who accompanied Ellis to the disciplinary hearing in Dublin, said he was disappointed with the outcome, adding: "We are very disappointed that what we saw as a clumsy tackle has been characterised by the panel as an offence at the top end of the range of offending.”

There was worse to come. Keeping his head down and barging ahead cussedly as he used to as a wonderful international hooker, Peter Wheeler, Tigers' Chief Executive said: "It was an unusual incident. Harry went into it, in my view, making a fair tackle and it developed into a dangerous tackle.

"You think he might have been given a bit more benefit of the doubt, but it was a dangerous situation, there's no doubt about that.

"Harry is a competitive guy and we did not think it was malicious in any way. It's something that happened. He has not been put in this situation before and he probably reacted in the wrong way.”

Sorry, not good enough. Plenty of things “just happen” in life. Murder just happens. So does wife beating. As a New Zealander I take no pride in the fact that O’Driscoll’s spear tackle also ‘just happened’. Besides the fact that he was lucky to walk again, the tackle deprived the Lions of a great skipper and both sets of supporters the chance of watching this superb player at the peak of his career take on the ultimate foe.

So as a Kiwi supporter, I would like to say something that I have not seen said in any fellow Antipodean quarter – “sorry”.

Brian O’Driscoll did not deserve what happened to him. Nor does any rugby player. It was a disgrace. But so what was happened to Dan Carter. Harry Ellis deserved every minute of his suspension and in our view should have got much longer.

There can be no more.