With rugby being the contact sport that it is, things don’t always go quite to plan and tackles often get misjudged, sometimes resulting in malicious looking consequences. Timing is everything. Here’s Rugby HQ’s take on the Top 5 tackles gone wrong.
We’ve featured each one of these over the years, the most recent being George North’s epic tackle and self-headslam with Israel Folau in the recent Wallabies vs British & Irish Lions series.
Lions captain Sam Warburton made an equally high profile tackle in the Rugby World Cup semi final in 2011. His ended in a red card, and somewhat tainted Wales’ chances of progressing to a final.
It was a big call by Alain Roland, but these days, as was seen with Michael Hooper last weekend, you simply can’t lift or tip a player like that.
A while back we featured a clip of Sitiveni Sivivatu flipping Cheetahs back JW Jonker over his head. It remains one of the wildest tackles in the archive, and although Jonker was fine, it was incredibly dangerous. Sivivatu disagreed.
In 2009 there was a nasty incident in Sydney club rugby as winger Leon Bott completely mistimed a tackle under a high ball, smashing Randwick’s David Dillon early, putting him in intensive care with a ruptured spleen. Surgery followed, but Dillon recovered well.
The final tackle here is one of the worst high shots in recent years, as Fritz Lee almost decapitated Luke Hamilton in the ITM Cup. Lee was shown a straight red for what was an incredibly dangerous shot, and thankfully Hamilton was fine, showing his mettle by playing on.
View all the Top 5’s from Rugby HQ that we’ve posted over the last few months, and you can take a longer look at each one of these incidents in the related posts below
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