What is it with these Poms? Someone taps a Scot on the head with his boot and there is a collective scream of outrage rising to a pitch that only dogs can hear.
Adam Thomson's mistake in scraping his boot on the headgear of Scottish loose forward Alasdair Strokosch was just that - a mistake.
Anyone in rugby who lets his boot come into contact with a head - even if there was no injury and no malicious intent - can expect to have the book thrown at them. An encyclopaedia. Or War & Peace. Or Marcel Proust's aptly named In Search Of Lost Time - all 4211 pages of it.
So, yes, it was a bit of a surprise that Thomson ended up with only one week off, even if any sensible analysis of the incident showed the following:No one was hurt.There was no malicious intent.It was a dumb error - stupid, even - which did not achieve anything like the objective of freeing the ball.Thomson has never been a dirty player.The victim came out on the side of the offender, making the entirely valid point that no harm was done.
But, dear oh dear, the squawking coming out of England ... The English media and some fans have gone crackers over this. I won't bother repeating it all and, to be fair, it doesn't approach the hideous bleating that went on over Brian O'Driscoll's accident during the Lions tour here in 2005. We don't even have to examine the pompous emissions of the Times' Stephen Jones as his boss' application of a paywall on the website means hardly anyone reads the Kiwi-baiter any more.