Was at the Super League Grand Final at Old Trafford yesterday. Wasn't an inspiring advert for the game but saw the first ever sending off in a Grand Final:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrPBnxacK2QSt Helens back Hohaia takes a swing at Wigan prop Flower, who demonstrates precisely why you don't pick a fight with a prop, knocking Hohaia unconscious with just two punches.
Flower was sent off whilst Hohaia's involvement in the game ended, although St Helens kept all 13 men. This happened in the 2nd minute of the first half so Wigan played nearly the entire game with a man down and ended up losing although they put up a decent fight. The punch was probably the highlight of the game with both sides making too many errors at this level of the game.
Comments
The Hohaia forearm was subtle enough (although out of order) but Flowers response was so obvious that he gave the refs no choice.
Ultimately he cost his team the game - punishment can't be any worse than that.
Great sport that.
The second punch was cowardly and disgusting.
Often hear of players in Rugby league getting 'reported' and banned after incidents.
Matin Offiah was on the telly too talking bollocks about how the police should keep out of it because "everything is different once you cross that white line". No, Martin an assault is an assault and a rugby pitch is not some kind of rarefied exempt and lawless place where you can get away with whatever.
No discipline. Like Suarez.
If you or I did that on our Sunday league games the old bill would be there in minutes!
Football players just fight referees, their own team, their managers, opposition managers, linesmen, ball-boys, pundits, opposition players, fans, but never opposition players.
For the record, no rugby fan insists that the players aren't prone to ill-discipline - punches and stamps aren't that rare. The difference is when a rugby player is hit, he doesn't roll around play-acting and screaming like a child. Likewise, when a rugby player is talking to the ref, he doesn't talk back, argue or swear. Of course there are exceptions but take a look at the difference betwen Premiership Football and Premiership Rugby when a ref chats to a player - it likes watching two completely different species.
Think you'll find the talking back to referees, play acting dramas are typically associated with foreign players rather than exclusively 'Premiership players'. Footballers will do anything to win, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. Rugby players will do anything to make themselves look like such gentlemen before they go out later that night and try drinking someone's p!ss through a sock.
Actually, scratch that, hope we don't have to see them for months.
League fans are basically your hard-core, flat-cap, pigeon-fancying northerners. Not too much elitist about them.
Union fans are a bit more mixed, in the south you get your Tarquin's and Timothy's but in other places - especially the West Country - it's quite working-class.
Do they do so every time there is a punch up on the rugby field or is it a different "white line" they cross?
One the above "crimes" is life threatening, the other isn't yet both sentences are, in essence, almost identical.