OPINION: Punish the player with a red card, not the team

World Rugby is set to expand its controversial 20-minute red card trial that is currently being implemented in the Super Rugby Pacific competition, with plenty of people both for and against the potential new law.

The rule allows for a player who has been red carded to be tactically substituted after a 20-minute period, allowing the offending team to return to 15 players.

With red cards often playing a massive part in how a match turns out, especially if it comes early in the game, fans and pundits have for years questioned whether there needs to be a change so that a single decision doesn’t have the potential to “ruin” an entire match.

Former Ireland head coach Joe Schmidt and current All Blacks head coach Ian Foster are some of the more influential advocates for the new law.

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However, some big names have also come out against it, including respected former referee Nigel Owens who officiated in more than 100 international matches. He believes it will be an insufficient deterrent for foul play and could make the game more dangerous.

But if a player is suitably punished for foul play, surely that should be deterrent enough for the player?

If a player is found to have committed a dangerous act of foul play, he should be punished accordingly with an appropriate ban.

The intended deterrent shouldn’t come from what it does to a team on the day, it should be for the offending player to not want to be banned from the game for a significant amount of time.

This is why World Rugby’s disciplinary process should rather come under review, should players not be deterred from committing acts of foul play, rather than a rule that should help keep matches more competitive.

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In terms of a team being punished, 20 minutes is a considerable amount of time to be playing with a man down.

A quarter of a game with a player less could easily make or break a match, so coaches will be just as disappointed with a player getting a red card under the new rules as before.

A 20-minute team sanction, with the offending player unable to return, could be a more than fitting punishment in a match, with subsequent disciplinary processes being used to judge and punish the player’s actions.