More than five years have passed since the former Ireland prop Reggie
Corrigan felt two fingers reach into his eye socket during a rugby match and
exert terrible pressure.
The memory has not dimmed over time. The incident happened in the Ireland v
Argentina game at the 2003 World Cup and over a 10-year career, it was the
only occasion Corrigan suffered such an injury.
“It was terrifying,” Corrigan says. “I had a contact lens ripped out of my eye
and I genuinely thought I was going to lose sight in that eye when it
happened. It is a really horrendous experience because you just feel the
nails of two fingers going straight into your eye ball. You don’t believe it
is actually happening and then it is over. It is literally a lunge, a grab,
and a release. At that point you are blinded for a short period of time and
I had no doubt whatsoever it was a deliberate act.
“I had to go off, my cornea was scratched. There was the disciplinary hearing,
the video showed the incident from about 10 different angles, you could see
the hand going to the face but you couldn’t see the fingers plunge into the
eye socket, which is the crucial bit. You had the referee’s report, the
medical evidence, my evidence and the evidence of the other player. He got
six weeks because the evidence wasn’t conclusive and I certainly felt, ‘Here
was a guy getting away with it’.”
Mauricio Reggiardo was the Argentina prop involved in the Corrigan incident.
His teammate Roberto Grau received a nine-week ban for an attack on the eye
of the Irish hooker, Keith Wood, during the same game. “It was very rare to
have this kind of thing happen,” says Corrigan, “I would be surprised if
these attacks are more prevalent now than then.”
The evidence suggests otherwise. On December 13 a Harlequins player complained
to teammates that he had been eye-gouged in the Heineken Cup match against
Stade Francais at The Stoop.
The next day Saracens director of rugby, Eddie Jones, complained his players
had been victims of eye-gouging in their European Challenge Cup victory over
Bayonne. “That is the way they play,” said Jones of the French. “It is
obviously allowed in their domestic competition but we really don’t want to
start seeing these sort of things in rugby.”
It is not exclusively a French problem. Since October last year, three
international players have been given bans for attacks in Guinness
Premiership games. Dylan Hartley, a member of the England squad, was given a
six-month ban for eye-gouging while playing for Northampton against Wasps.
In April, the Fijian international Seru Rabeni, who plays for Leicester, was
banned for 14 weeks for eye-gouging Saracens’ Andy Kyriacou. The most recent
case involved Ireland’s Northampton flanker Neil Best, who received an
18-week ban for an attack on the eye of Wasps’ James Haskell in October.
The situation is no more reassuring in other competitions. Last March, the
Italian flanker Mauro Bergamasco was given a 13-week ban for eye-gouging
during his country’s 47-8 loss to Wales in an RBS Six Nations match. In
October, the Romani-an hooker Marius Tincu was banned for 18 weeks for
gouging in a Heineken Cup game for Perpignan against Ospreys. “The
question,” says former international referee and a current citing officer,
John West, “is whether more of this stuff is happening or that we have
become better at picking it up. My own feeling is that it is a bit of both.”
Judge Jeff Blackett, the RFU’s disciplinary officer, believes attacks on the
face and eye are on the increase. “I think the first thing you’ve got to
say,” he says , “is that it is not just eye-gouging. Eye-gouging is the
emotive expression, but the offence is actually contact with the eyes and it
ranges from a bit of roughing up, where someone rubs their hand in
somebody’s face, and inadvertently makes contact with the eye. That’s at the
bottom end.
“At the other end, you have the player who maliciously sticks a finger in
somebody’s eye. That’s eye-gouging and, obviously there’s a whole lot of
offences in between. Whenever there’s contact with the eye, people call it
eye-gouging; sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. I have noticed that there
seems to be an increased incidence of contact with people’s faces and eyes.
“I want to be quite careful here because I don’t want to make allegations that
are unsupportable but I have heard a number of complaints from English
Premiership teams, and Welsh teams, against the French. I’m not saying the
French are the dirtiest.
“You see quite a lot on televi-sion of players looking at the referee and
pointing to their eyes. People may remember Lawrence Dallaglio towards the
end of his career protesting to the referee that Carlos Spencer did
something to his eye in a Wasps v Northampton Heineken Cup semi-final.”
If “eye gouging” is an emotive term, it is hardly a surprise that disciplinary
measures are fiercely contested. Perpignan believe they have been the
victims in the case of Tincu, insisting that there was no evidence that
justified banning the hooker. They have since won the right to play Tincu in
their national championship as the French national sport’s body ruled that a
ban received in one competition should not preclude a player from
participating in another. This ruling contravenes international rugby law
and rugby’s world body is now seeking answers from the French federation.
Blackett heard the Tincu case on behalf of the European Rugby Cup. “To say, as
Perpignan have said, that there wasn’t a shred of evidence is absolute
nonsense. First, there was clearly an injury to the eye of the Ospreys prop
Paul James. He reacted by punching Tincu and flooring him. The video
evidence effectively showed the punch. Now it was clear something went on
before this and the evidence we heard was that James felt a finger in his
eye, pushing. He called it gouging.
“He felt someone gouging his eye and he grabbed hold of the hand that was
gouging him and he clung on for dear life to the hand. When everything had
dispersed, the hand belonged to Tincu and he punched him. Tincu said he
didn’t do it. So the direct evidence we had was James saying he did it,
Tincu saying he didn’t. We also had the evidence of the eye, which was real
and according to objective medical opinion had been caused by a hand or nail
and we also had evidence that James had reported the eye-gouging to the
referee during the match.
“The French made much of the fact that Tincu was wearing gloves, something
James couldn’t remember. We had to decide on the balance of probability and
we believed James to be an honest witness. We were convinced that it was
Tincu who did it.”
Jeff Probyn, the former England prop who more recently sat on the same RFU
disciplinary panel as Blackett, is far from convinced of an increase.
“Certainly, I wouldn’t say there is more of it now,” he says.
“Professionalism has played a part in this as it can benefit teams to make a
protest. In my day, and even in earlier times, these things would happen,
they would be noted and revenge would be exacted.
“I can remember my feeling that things were changing when England had Lawrence
Dallaglio and John Mallett photographed to highlight the stud marks on their
backs during a 1994 game in South Africa, as if it was something new.
“In relation to gouging, I wouldn’t say the French are any worse than other
nations. I played games against the Welsh, who stuck fingers in my eyes, the
Irish, the Scottish, the English at club level and I think you want to be
careful, a slight jab in the eye can cause less damage than a fractured
cheekbone or a broken jaw. The reality is that it’s a side of rugby that has
happened in the past and will continue to happen in the future.”
That may be the case but it is a view that Blackett cannot accept. “We must
deter people from going near the eyes and when we find players doing it, we
give them sanctions that deter others. We love rugby because of the physical
confrontation, but we want it to be fair physical confrontation. We want to
take out the malicious and insidious acts of violence.”
The guilty fingered: a modern history of gouging
1992 Waikato prop Richard Loe is banned for six months after being
found guilty of eye-gouging All Black teammate Greg Cooper in a match
against Otago
1997 North Harbour’s Troy Flavell is banned for a year on the basis of
a photograph showing him gouging Wellington’s Steve Sinkinson. The ban is
reduced to three weeks on appeal
1999 Despite the publication of an apparently incriminating photo (see
above), Argentina prop Roberto Grau is cleared of gouging Wales’s Garin
Jenkins at the World Cup
2003 Grau is suspended for nine weeks for raking his hand over the face
of Ireland’s Keith Wood at the World Cup in Australia. Grau’s front-row
colleague Mauricio Reggiardo is banned for using his hand against Reggie
Corrigan’s face in a manner that carried a ‘significant and unacceptable
risk of injury’
2007 Northampton’s Dylan Hartley receives a 26-week suspension for
making ‘contact with the eye areas’ of Jonny O’Connor, Joe Worsley and James
Haskell in a match against Wasps
APRIL 2008 Leicester’s Seru Rabeni is banned for 14 weeks after
eye-gouging Saracens hooker Andy Kyriacou
OCTOBER 2008 Northampton’s Neil Best pleads guilty to eye-gouging,
against Wasps, and is ruled out for 18 weeks
NOVEMBER 2008 Marcus Tincu is given an 18-week suspension for gouging
but is selected by Perpignan while banned
DECEMBER 2008 Saracens coach Eddie Jones cites Bayonne in a European
Challenge Cup match: ‘We have made a complaint to the referee about gouging
for the second time in as many weeks
