Can someone please explain the sending offs yesterday to me

And just to illustrate the point

<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Muybridge_runner.jpg">

Yours, a deluded fantasist.

 

It's ok to disagree on things, but if you would like a reply: look at the guy in the 'running motion' picture, his back is straight and upright, Mellis is leaning backwards. Mellis is jumping here, not running. When you make a slide tackle, you slide. You don't jump. Mellis is jumping.

We wasn't in control as soon as his feet left the floor and he jumped. If he had caught the player, he would have hurt him.

 

Of course he is, he's moving from a running position in to a sliding position. He's between the two. That's the position you are in when you are between the two. He's sticking his right foot out to make the tackle and in order to do this he has to lean back. All sliding tackles involve leaning back. No one slides in sat upright.

Go outside and make a sliding tackle. Tackle the clothes prop or next door's cat, see if you lean back.

Find more side on still shots of football players sprinting and then making a tackle. Everyone single one of them, within the sequence, will have a still like the one above because it's impossible to go from running, when both feet are off the ground, in to sliding, when one foot is on the floor, without having this transition phase.

I'm not getting at you Luke, I'm explaining why that particular still shows what it does.

Isn't that true of every tackle ever made? If you don't get the ball but get the man, you hurt them. That is without doubt a fact. And that is why a foul is given when you catch the player. In this case Mellis didn't catch the player, he didn't hurt him, he won the ball, with one foot, with his other foot behind him and on the ground at the point he made the tackle.

 

Pre meditated jump into a tackle
Anybody could see that
Foolish in the extreme
Ref already sent two off - he needs to grow up and learn !

 

But one of theirs did same thing to Jennings and never even got a yellow