Quote ="Roy Haggerty"A silly article. Tomkins let-off is truly awful, as you won't get many clearer incidents - he kicked the tackled man. The ref saw it, the players saw it, 10,000 people in the ground saw it and tens of thousands more viewers saw it. It should have resulted in a ban, but didn't. That's in-keeping with a long line of strange decisions from the disciplinary committee concerning Wigan players. Quins fans will recall a decision 5 or 6 years ago when a pie (Paul Johnson ?) launched a flying Cantona-style karate kick at a Quins player, only to emerge from the disiplinary with the message that he had been trying to effect the tackle legally. '"
It was Martin Aspinwall on Jon Wells, it was so high it struck him in the torso. I believe the initial response from the RFL was that there was a lack of evidence, unfortunately this just led to ridicule of the RFL when it was pointed out that the game was televised by Sky and the indcident was clearly captured on VCR's up and down the land, after that the RFL changed its mind and admitted it could now see what everyone else could, but there was no punishment (I think there may have been a letter about poor technique).
Sad thing is nobody at all is really surprised by how absurdly inconsistent the disciplinary system is, in some cases like the above it’s nothing short of bizarre. It seems that the RFL is reluctant to move to a more open and independent disciplinary system which would acknowledge all the blatant incidents that currently seem to fall down the back of the sofa when they review these things. But then a better system would almost certainly remove some of the discretionary power the RFL has over its competitions.
