The Namibia captain, Johan Deysel, has been given an effective five-match suspension for his dangerous tackle on Antoine Dupont that left the France skipper with a facial fracture and on the sidelines at the Rugby World Cup.
Deysel received a red card for the incident in France’s 96-0 win in Marseille last week, and later apologised having received online abuse. An Independent Judicial Committee have decided the tackle met the top end on the scale of seriousness, which is a 12-game suspension, but have also applied the maximum 50% reduction in sentence following his apology and previous good record.
Deysel has indicated he will attend World Rugby’s ‘tackle school’, a coaching intervention programme, to have a further game taken off his suspension. The first match of his ban is Namibia’s final World Cup Pool A meeting with Uruguay on Wednesday, where Deysel had been left out of the team selection named on Monday by coach Allister Coetzee.
The committee took into account the “degree of recklessness involved in the offending, the vulnerability of the victim player and the significant injury to him” in finding Deysel guilty. It is rare for a judicial committee to start at the top end of the scale, with Dupont’s injury, and the outcry that followed, perhaps the biggest factor.
Namibia’s Johan Retief will also miss the match against Uruguay after the backs coach, Chrysander Botha, seemed to confirm that a spider bite had ruled the back-row forward out. “You can’t plan for something like that to happen but we’ll miss him,” he said. Coetzee had previously only said that Retief was suffering from a “weird” injury. “He has developed an abscess close to his pectoral area which means the wound has been open,” Coetzee said cryptically at Monday’s team announcement.
Dupont has had surgery and will remain with France’s squad “under medical supervision” at the tournament, though no official timeline has been given on when he is expected to return to play. A best-case scenario would be the quarter-finals on the weekend of 14-15 October.
“It’s definitely a big blow to lose a player like Antoine. He is our captain, he’s the best player in the world,” said the centre Arthur Vincent as the hosts prepare to play Italy on Friday. “But we’ve already been through those kind of situations, unfortunately. We’re solid as a group, we’ve experienced that before. Things will come naturally. There is not only one captain. We have a group of leaders who have been working together for the last four years. All the players know their roles and bring something to the table.”
While Maxime Lucu or Baptiste Couilloud will replace Dupont in the No 9 shirt, the flanker Charles Ollivon will return to the captaincy he previously held for two years from 2020.
