Contrite Leinster lock Hayden Triggs gets three-week ban

Hayden Triggs has been ruled out of Leinster’s final Champions Cup pool game with Castres tomorrow night, after the lock received a three-week ban for making contact with the eye area of Montpellier’s Nic White during last Friday’s win at the RDS.

When the New Zealander was cited, there had been fears a longer ban would keep him out of a Champions Cup quarter-final tie. Had Triggs been deemed to have made contact with Triggs’ eye, the sanction would have been at least 12 weeks and potentially much longer.

However, yesterday’s hearing in Paris ruled that the infringement related to contact with the eye area rather than the eye itself.

A four-week suspension is the low entry sanction for contact with the eye area but Triggs’ ban was reduced by one due to his admission of guilt and remorse. He will be available to return from February 20.

Montpellier’s Francois Steyn was handed a four-week ban for his late challenge on Jonathan Sexton in the same game.

Meanwhile, the Rugby Football Union will consider imposing its own five-year residency rule on England if World Rugby fails to increase the existing level for eligibility.

France have taken the lead in one of the most controversial elements of the game by declaring they will only select those who hold a French passport in the hope it will reverse the national team’s reliance on overseas-born players.

A player currently becomes eligible once they have lived in a country for three years but a campaign led by World Rugby vice-chairman Agustin Pichot is seeking to raise the level by a further 24 months in the hope it will enable less wealthy nations to retain their best talent.

The sport’s global governing body will vote on whether to change the rule at its biannual council meeting in May, and RFU chief executive Ian Ritchie has made England’s position clear.

“Our view will be that a five-year qualification is the optimum position to be in. We feel that an increase from three to five years is absolutely the route to go down and that’s what we’d support,” Ritchie said.

“There are other countries who will take a different view on that I think, and that’s up to them. We’ll see how that goes.

“In an ideal world there’d be universality of regulation and there’s a helpful way of dealing with this, and that’s by moving the World Rugby regulation from three to five years.

“We’ll wait until the debate at World Rugby and see if we can move it from three to five years and then we’d review it after that.”

Last autumn England gave starts to Nathan Hughes and Semesa Rokoduguni, both of whom were born in Fiji but qualified for Eddie Jones’ men having lived in England for three years. “If you have a small playing base and don’t have highly competitive internationals, then I could well understand why somebody would like it to be less than that. Our position will be the five years,” Ritchie said.