Quote ="FearTheVee"The tackle looks completely unnecessary which is a bad start, and it only takes a players leg to be planted at a slight angle for that to do serious damage.
No need for it, shouldn’t happen and he should pick up a ban.
As a Saints fan I hope he doesn’t as he’s garbage IMO.
On the flip side I’d be utterly amazed if all the Wakey injuries were down to foul play. Sounds like a mixture of being unlucky/frustrated with injuries and there being a couple of naughty tackles in the game - without the two necessarily being linked.'"
I haven't seen the match video yet but according to a Wakefield fan who has, none of their injuries was even down to foul play. We could have just as easily bleated about Cas' foul play last week as a reason for our leg injuries, intimating it surely wasn't a coincidence that they were knee injuries. Of course it would have been utter nonsense too.
The problem here is they are playing to stereotyping. Wigan have a reputation based on the Maguire era (before it was banned btw) and so every leg injury is now due to Wigan's 'dirty tactics'. The truth is
all clubs, including yours, employ the 'third man round the legs' tackle. There were many, many examples during all three televised games this week.
The simple fact is that Wigan's record in this department is no worse than any other team and, certainly in other areas of foul play, many are far worse. Of course, this doesn't fit the 'Big, bad Wigan' narrative that opposition fans like to play along with so conveniently gets swept under the carpet under the deluge of social media faux outrage.
The Powell one looks bad and if he picks up a ban then fair enough. He won't be the first and he certainly won't be the last. However, from the video doing the rounds he's clearly not doing anything against the directive on 3rd tackles as he is applying force in the direction the knee bends. For my own part, I still don't much like it because of the vigour he's doing it with but I could quite easily pick out another dozen of this type from the televised games alone. They may not look as bad but the net result (i.e. attacker brought to ground while stationary with no resulting injury) would be the same.
Let's see what the disciplinary say.
