Peter Jackson discovers which clubs and players come out bestand worstwhen it comes to red and yellow cards
DESPITE winning just four matches all season and losing four times as many more, Cardiff somehow stumbled into a double without precedent in European rugby.
There are doubles to justify tickertape parades and then there is this one, assembled so far under the radar that neither the club nor their fans have the faintest clue, until now. They won’t know whether to laugh or cry over something largely caused by a series of mishaps.
Of the 40 contenders on the starting grid for Europe’s three major leagues, only one finished top of the two card tables nobody bothers to publish except The Rugby Paper: one for the most reds, the other for the fewest yellows.
Nobody had more of the former and less of the latter than a club whose nickname continues to do almost as much for immodesty as Stormy Daniels. Cardiff ’s self-promotion as The Greatest dates back to the early 1950s when they had Lions galore and a following vast enough to fill the Arms Park to its 48,000-limit for a club match against Newport.
Over the course of a season marked by a sharp decline in red cards, Cardiff still accumulated a quartet of their own, as doled out to Ciaran Parker in their first match, Seb Davies in their last with Rey Lee-Lo and Ellis Jenkins in between.
Castres, alone of the other 39 contenders, were dealt as many reds, accumulated in their case over 31 matches. Cardiff accumulated theirs over 22 at what could be called a strike rate of one red in every five-and-a-half matches compared to Castres’ infinitely more disciplined of one in every eight.
On the other hand, when they weren’t being dealt reds, they played theirs smartly enough to avoid the sin-bin on all but eight occasions. Nobody else gave it a wider berth with only Munster matching Cardiff ’s commendably thin pack of yellows.
Analysis of figures for all competitive club matches, domestic and European, show a 40 per cent drop in red cards. Sendings-off in the English Premiership were more than halved, from 26 in 2022-23 to 11 last season, a drop which cannot be dismissed as an obvious consequence of a competition emasculated by the collapse of Wasps, Worcester Warriors and London Irish.
While marching orders in the Top 14 fell from 34 to 19, those in the United Rugby Championship remained identical to the previous season at 17 after Munster’s Alex Nankivell saw red in yesterday’s semi-final.
More clubs avoided a single red than in recent seasons: four from the Premiership (Gloucester, Harlequins, Newcastle, Sale), five from the URC (Zebre, Ulster, Leinster, Connacht, Glasgow) and four from the Top 14 (Bayonne, Bordeaux, Pau, Perpignan).
Of those 13, t
