'I don’t envy being a referee at the moment'

England wing Anthony Watson hopes World Cup officials can find a greater level of consistency on sanctioning dangerous tackles, but accepts they have a difficult job to do in interpreting the laws.

Tom Curry was red-carded and banned for two matches after a dangerous tackle on Argentina’s Juan Cruz Mallia in England’s opening game last weekend.

However, similar incidents in matches involving South Africa and Chile went unpunished by officials.

Watson, who missed out on a place in England’s World Cup squad because of a calf injury suffered on the eve of the tournament, told the PA news agency: “There is a bit of inconsistency there, but you’re always going to get inconsistency when it’s interpretation of a law. There’s no black or white answer to them all.

“Would we like it to be better? Yes, we definitely would. But I don’t think we can ever get to a position where we can say ‘this is a red card and this is not a red card’.

“It always has to be an interpretation, and what comes with that is a little bit of inconsistency. What I would say is that we would probably like a little bit more consistency than there currently is. But I don’t envy being a referee at the moment.”

Watson added it was “not great” for players either trying to adapt to the stringent new rules, but said everyone is training extremely hard to minimise the number of tackles deemed to be dangerous.

“If you take Tom Curry’s one – which he has accepted was a red card by the way – when you go into a tackle with as much commitment as he does and someone’s head drops as much as (Mallia’s) did, it’s very, very difficult for him to change his body position,” Watson said.

“So I don’t envy players, and it’s not great being a player at the moment and trying to do that. But what you can do is work on it and try to mitigate it as much as possible by making sure the majority of your tackles are within a certain bandwidth, and all of the lads are doing that because we practise three or four times a week.

“There are some incidents where it’s extremely difficult, but you have just got to try to be as conscious as possible about your tackle height as often as possible.”

Watson accepts the tackle laws are crucial, not just to protect current players but also to set the right example to children looking to get involved in the sport, and their parents.

He attended a grassroots training session in Crewe on Friday to mark Concussion Awareness Day. Led by UK Coaching, the club delivered a session highlighting that every sport’s first priority must always be safety and well-being, and the role of education and support for coaches.

Watson said: “Safety in sport is massively important and today is about raising the awareness of UK Coaching’s Duty To Care toolkit, which provides resources for coaches.

“That can be anything from the mental health of the coaches themselves or their players to concussion, which I think is most prevalent here at a rugby club. It is about being able to see the symptoms of concussions and work with players on how they can mitigate those risks, and to pull players out if they see those symptoms early.

“Putting the rules in place in the elite game and making sure the right example is set means that kids don’t see ridiculous high tackles where people are getting injured and try to copy that, because it’s the wrong thing to be copying.

“The bigger picture sometimes gets lost with these rules. You want to create change in the players’ habits to get them to tackle lower, and that is because we don’t want to see as many concussions in the game, and we also want kids and their parents not to be scared of getting concussions and to enjoy the sport as much as possible.”

:: To find out more about Duty to Care and to access the Hub, visit https://www.ukcoaching.org/duty-to-care and for resources on concussion visit https://www.ukcoaching.org/resources/concussion.