Is the (real) red card dead?

Since the moment the 20-minute red card was first introduced, I’ve been a very vocal opponent. Not even the Sharks getting to bring on a replacement for Francois Venter during the Currie Cup semi-final last year as a result of the trial law could convince me of its benefits – I’d rather we had lost that game, and the tournament, than embrace the abbreviated version of the red card. Now World Rugby has announced that they will be making a decision on its future next month during a council meeting, and I can only hope that sense prevails, and votes are cast to send it to the bin – permanently.

The reality is that the trial of the 20-minute red has been something of a farce. Sceptics were assured that the full version of a red card would still be an option for blatant displays of deliberate and dangerous foul play and thuggery, but we haven’t really seen that happen in practice. The introduction of another layer of punishment has muddied the already murky disciplinary waters, and the truth is that referees need fewer options to choose from, not more, when making split second decisions. Studies have shown that survey respondents will often choose the middle ground when given the opportunity – when faced with a scale of 1-5, how often do you just pick 3? This happens for a variety of reasons: indecision, unwillingness to expend the effort to make a choice, lack of information, and the desire not to be seen as extreme. And it feels as if this element of human nature is now coming into play on the rugby field too. When the middle ground of a 20-minute red card is available, are refs avoiding going full red because they don’t want to be seen as overly harsh? Or because it’s too difficult to distinguish between a sort of red offence and a very red offence in the limited time available to make that decision in the heat of the game, especially when they know they’ll be crucified if they get it wrong? To make matters worse, and in a clear indictment of just how confusing things appear to be for referees right now, we have situations where a player like Peato Mauvaka can launch himself into a prone Ben White after the whistle, with not even a pretence at a legitimate tackle to disguise his attempted headbutt, and get nothing more than a yellow. It’s hard to imagine how this could be seen as anything other than deliberate and dangerous foul play – and the fact that Mauvaka was later cited, and the yellow was upgraded to red just serves to reinforce the obvious lack of clarity during games.

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The 20-minute red card law trial also came with the explanation that the intention was to make sanctions about punishing the individual who had transgressed, rather than the team as a whole. Thus, the player involved stays off permanently, but the team goes back to full strength after 20 minutes. And so we were assured that this more individualistic approach to discipline would be reflected in harsher post-match sanctions. Yet we haven’t seen this happen in practice either. If anything, sanctions continue to be wildly inconsistent, but there certainly does not appear to be a trend towards longer bans overall. To get a rough sense of this, I took a look at the length of bans received in last year’s Men’s Six Nations, when the 20-minute red card was not in play, versus this year’s contest, when it was. The Six Nations website details two red cards in the 2024 iteration. Paul Willemse received a three-week ban for dangerous tackles resulting in two yellow cards, a cumulative red, and a citing, while Jonathan Dante received a four-week ban, also for a dangerous tackle, aggravated by his prior poor disciplinary record.

In the 2025 iteration of the contest, five players received red cards or were cited, including Mauvaka, who received a three-week ban for the incident described above. Romain Ntamack, Garry Ringrose and Ross Vincent all received two-week bans for dangerous tackles, while Giacomo Nicotera received four weeks for dangerous play in the ruck. What is notable when reading the disciplinary decisions is that there is no obvious difference between 2024 and 2025 in the sanctions being handed down, or the considerations of mitigation and aggravation being applied. In other words, if players are being given harsher sanctions in the wake of the 20-minute red card trial, it’s hard to find evidence of them. Obviously this was just one rough and ready analysis of a small sample of games, but I’d be surprised if more thorough research uncovered anything vastly different. It's also impossible not to notice that the number of trips to the disciplinary panel more than doubled between the two iterations of the Men’s Six Nations. Again, anything suggested here would be purely anecdotal, but could referees be giving out more reds because the 20-minute option is now available? Or is player discipline deteriorating, possibly because a 20-minute red card is not a severe enough deterrent? Whatever the case may be, the bottom line is that the promised approach to individual sanctions, rather than punishing the whole team with the loss of a player, just doesn’t seem to have been implemented at all.

Of course, those in favour of the 20-minute red will argue that it ensures an even contest and an exciting game for fans who have paid good money to watch 15 against 15. I would argue that the onus isn’t on World Rugby to ensure this by negating the original intent of a red card, making it easier for teams to get away with questionable tackles and dodgy rucks because that deterrent is softened. Instead, the onus should be on players and coaches to improve discipline and technique, and keep 15 players on the field like that. And yes, I know, refereeing consistency needs work. Throwing more permutations into the mix is not making that any better, clearly. I’ll say it again. Let’s not add more complexity to an already complicated set of laws.

At a time when player welfare is once again in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, as the tragic news of Sébastien Chabal’s memory loss and possible CTE hits hard, I hope those who get to vote next month do so wisely. I’ll be blunt – as far as I’m concerned, a 20-minute red card is not a red card at all. It’s a weird middle ground that doesn’t serve the game, or those who put their bodies on the line to play it every week. If it gets sufficient votes to become a permanent part of the laws, then – to bastardise a line from Pulp Fiction – red’s dead, baby. Red’s dead. And player safety might be next.