In a recent Top 14 match against Bordeaux Begles, the talismanic Italian number eight Sergio Parisse was sent off while paying for club-team Stade Francais for insulting a referee and initially banned from all competitions for 40 days, with 10 of those suspended.
On appeal his sentence was reduced to a 20 day ban and, most interestingly of all, he will also have to attend a refereeing course.
This allowed him to play for his country against England at the weekend, a match he clearly had a huge impact on, but compare his punishment to the non-existent deterrents for footballers who vigorously protest almost every decision going against them.
No fan wants the referee to get a decision wrong, particularly not when it goes against your team or adversely affects the outcome of a match and in the passionate arena of sport it can be hard to keep emotions under wraps.
Current Scotland manager Gordon Strachan once said on BBC Football Focus, when asked about this disparity, the advantage rugby players have is the physicality means any frustration can be got out of the players system much quicker than it can in football. His argument boiling down to the fact rugby players can tackle their way out of these situations.
While his point certainly has merit, it is hard to recall a time, even after a game, when a rugby match official was heavily criticised for their performance. Compare this to the almost weekly rants by managers and players in the Premiership and lower down the football leagues.
Are rugby officials simply wrong less of the time than they are in football, do instant replays mean fewer important decisions are given incorrectly or is it simply footballers acting like petulant teenagers?
Take a decision this weekend when well-established football referee Mark Clattenburg gave an injury time penalty to Norwich City against Southampton. The penalty, at best, was a soft decision, but it was saved by the South-coast team’s keeper the game ended 0-0.
The fact the decision ended up bearing no relation to the result did not stop the Saints players and manager, Mauricio Pochettino, mobbing Clattenburg at the final whistle to complain about the decision. This is certainly not a isolated incident and is just one of many examples from the weekend.
If we face facts it is unlikely it would be possible to instil the inherent respect rugby players have in footballers, but the Parisse incident and subsequent punishment should certainly be taken on board by football associations.
In a recent article The Guardian website chronicled the day at a football refereeing centre for sports writers, with the unsurprising conclusion being it is more difficult than it appears.
So why do the FA not force players and managers who consistently lambast refereeing decisions to go and try officiating for a day?
This would show them just how difficult it can be to make split second decisions, demonstrate the pressure officials are under and hopefully generate in them more respect.
Football players should be punished for descent as they are in every other sport. However, any punishment is pointless unless they learn something from it and unfortunately footballers do not respond to pointless match-bans or ludicrously small fines.
So while there may be a limit of what the players of each sport can learn from each, maybe the FA could learn something from rugby’s governing bodies in terms of handing out punishments.
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