OK - it's exciting to watch from the safety of the terraces or the couch.

But can you really condone it? One punch can kill after all. Surely the sport has to do it all it can to eradicate this sort of behaviour and in doing so:
a - maintain the safety of players taking part in the sport
b - encourage more people to play the sport which yes, will always be tough, aggressive and a heavy demand on the body - but fair and ultimately safe as it can be.

Don't be such a sexist

He was actually playing centre


I get your point though

You are Stevo and I claim my 5 pounds

Has anybody in the history of RL ever had a serious injury from a fight on the pitch? If you want to make it safe stop tackling and play tag!

I miss the punch ups it seemed to sort any problems when there was a little scuffle in the first ten mins

Some of the comments on here are laughable, defending the indefendsable yet again.

In what way

Why is punching someone acceptable on the sports field but not in tesco's?

that's a stupid comparison as your sort of saying it would be alright to rugby tackle someone in Tesco but not punch them .Walking round doing your shopping is a bit different to playing a full on contact sport

What if you bumped trollys?

Just because your playing sport you can punch someone?

Your pumped up so these things happen if you punch someone in a shop you don't shake there hand half hour later but they do on a sports field and the crowd love a good punch up do you are in a very small minority