The England captain, Dylan Hartley is free to lead England in the Six Nations Championship after receiving a six-week ban for his stiff-arm tackle on Leinster’s Sean O’Brien last Friday. The Northampton hooker, however, will be extremely short of match practice if he is selected to start against France at Twickenham on 4 February.
A slightly longer suspension would have put Hartley’s Six Nations participation in severe doubt but he is now available to play again from 23 January. If he does lead out England against the French, however, he will have had only six minutes of competitive action in the previous two months, having previously had limited rugby this autumn because of a bad back.
The Rugby Football Union has already made clear it has no moral objection to Hartley returning as captain but the head coach, Eddie Jones, now has a delicate balance to strike. Should Saracens’ Jamie George play well between now and the end of next month, it will be hard to argue on pure playing grounds that Hartley is a better bet to face France. On the other hand England have just won 13 games in a row with Hartley in charge, not the worst advert for his leadership qualities.
With the game’s governing body World Rugby confirming stricter penalties for reckless high tackles will come into effect in the new year, Hartley has reason to be grateful for small mercies.
A three-man independent disciplinary hearing in London decided his offence should merit a mid-range entry point, rather than a top-end sanction, and also deducted a week for his guilty plea. His chequered previous disciplinary record counted against him, however, with two weeks added to the starting punishment of five weeks.
It means the 30-year-old Hartley has now racked up 60 weeks of suspensions in his career, far in excess of most of his contemporaries. Despite previous bans for biting, gouging and butting, however, Jones saw him as the ideal man to help restore a bit of edge to England’s pack and England’s perfect year had also enhanced his candidacy for the captaincy of next year’s British and Irish Lions squad.
Dylan Hartley is banned for six weeks after being sent off for this incident on the weekend. #ChampionsCup https://t.co/H9C0S6SbnB
— BT Sport Rugby (@btsportrugby) December 14, 2016
Being chosen by Warren Gatland to lead the Lions would now appear improbable, unless he can rebound from this setback to steer England to a second successive Six Nations grand slam and convince everyone that the O’Brien episode was merely a blip. For all the support he has received from Twickenham – “We recognise what Dylan has done over the last 12 months … his disciplinary performance in an England shirt has been exemplary during those games,” stressed the RFU’s chief executive, Ian Ritchie – putting him in charge of next summer’s tour to New Zealand might not be a universally popular appointment among the other three home nations.
Hartley has a much better disciplinary record for his country than his club, however, and it is Northampton who must again do without him for their remaining three European Champions’ Cup fixtures against Leinster, Castres and Montpellier, as well as their Premiership games against Sale, Gloucester and Bristol over Christmas and the new year.
If Jones does decide Hartley has had insufficient game time to start against the French there would be three main candidates for the run-on England captaincy in Owen Farrell, Maro Itoje and Mike Brown. Farrell has been described as ready for the responsibility by his director of rugby at Saracens, Mark McCall, while his club-mate Itoje has already captained England Under-20s. A fourth possible contender, Billy Vunipola, is currently unavailable having been ruled out of the entire championship through injury.
