SANZAAR’s drive to see the 20-minute red card introduced across the international game has made progress, although there are still hurdles to be cleared.
SANZAAR Chief Executive Brendan Morris attended the recent World Rugby “Shape of the Game” forum in London, and told Stuff.co that the proposal had been recommended for a vote at a World Rugby council meeting in May.
If successful, and the council vote needs to be a 75 percent majority, the proposal would be advanced to a global trial, which is the first step to it becoming law.
However, there is still some reticence from the Six Nations competition, with Stuff being told by two sources that France had reservations.
Morris says the [Shape of the Game] workshop made some recommendations, one of which was that the 20-minute red card would go to a global trial.
He says in the short term, the Six Nations bloc came back to them and said, they would prefer to go to a closed trial and then come back and have another look.
The 20-minute red card has been used in a closed trial in Super Rugby since 2020, and introduced into the Rugby Championship in 2021, although it wasn’t used last year to make it consistent with the rules that teams would encounter at the Rugby World Cup.
Cognisant of the player welfare implications, Morris says that if the 20-minute proposal made it into law it could be accompanied by a tougher off-field sanctioning regime.
Morris says the sanctions off-field may to go up a little bit to make it more a deterrent.
Morris says that southern hemisphere fans had told Sanzaar loud and clear they opposed 80-minute red cards, especially as a number of them were due to technique and timing issues in the tackle, rather than dirty play.
Source: Stuff.co
