Opinion: I hope the judiciary or 'rugby killers' let Ardie Savea off with a warning for his heat-of-the-moment throat-slitting antics...
He doesn't deserve to be sent packing for weeks when it was just a gesture. Rugby is a contact sport, blood is boiling, they're pumped, egos, adrenalin, nerves - for goodness sake cut these guys some slack.
Too many rules are killing the game. Over the top, pathetic referring and the over-policing of clashes once deemed commonplace is also killing the code.
Go watch Cowboy Shaw in the 1981 series against Africa.
That game would have ended with 30 players off by halftime.
Overreactions to heat-of-the-moment stuff. I'll say it again, 30 bodies flying into each other means she's a hostile dark place up front - maybe the judiciary needs a quick field trip to experience it for themselves.
Perhaps we need the judiciary to be put on notice - and it reads: don't kill the game we love by turning it into an all-inclusive game of touch and hug and release.
This sport is about collisions at speed - and it's being over-refereed by those who still tuck their underpants into their one-piece singlet. Rugby is a man's game and is now also a rugged game for women.
And focus on the genuinely dirty players, not the role models for which Ardie is certainly one.
Those who make and enforce the rules appear to never have played the game.
This is a contact sport full of collisions and the game is intense, close contact brings out all sorts of things in players and Ardie addressed it like a champion and apologised afterwards.
The self-important twats who sit in judgement will want to make their mark. Wouldn't it be refreshing if they let it pass? I mean if we ban Ardie for that - let's ban the haka outright - throat gestures and hissing and effing and blinding.
Ardie is better than that, he knows it, and we all know it, the poster boy is allowed a moment of madness and no one was hurt in the process.
As Chopper Reid would say, harden the hell up would ya?
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