Rugby Has to Deal Robustly With This Spite for Sore Eyes

Eye-gouging has been around as long as all the other assault weapons in the rugby villain's armory. It's just a question of reassessing its place in the chart, now that it seems to have become the tool of the moment.

Even before the Ospreys erroneously leveled their complaint against Julian White last Saturday – it just goes to show that you can't beat a scratched cornea when it comes to spotting the wrong culprit – the word was that the old digit had wiggled its way back into the eye-socket of nefarious fashion.

A rummage round the optical orbit requires no back swing and can be guaranteed to make the point. Swing a hay maker and somebody – some camera – is bound to spot it. And it normally misses. Not so the creeping walk of the dirty finger up the cheek towards the point of entry.

It has always been a continental favorite. "La Fourchette", the French call it. But they also enjoyed a squeeze of the testicles, to the extent that you couldn't call yourself a decent pilier (prop) until you had slid a cricket box into your jockstrap.

The stamp on the head remains the great taboo of rugby. I remember Chris Ralston, the England second-row, requiring a score and more of stitches to repair stud damage to his swede. Suspicion not unnaturally fell on the feet of Llanelli, if only because they were running around the same field as Ralston's Richmond. The scandal raged for days, without anyone being brought to book. It remains one of the unsolved crimes of the sport.

But the boot to the bonce has slipped way down the list and lies at rest, only just above the stiletto blade that occasionally crept into the stockings of French villagers on derby days in the 1930s. The dear, dear 30s: the good old days of violence.

To use a blade suggests a fair degree of premeditation, and that is the sneakiest aspect of the eye-gouge. It's not a flash, a punch thrown in anger, an elbow thrust back in frustration; it requires an element of planning and patience. You have to wait until the victim is head down and helpless.

It also requires a pretty kinky appetite for feeling squidgy body parts. There are some places that hands are not meant to visit and the dark side of the eyeball is one of them.

Rugby is almost antiseptically clean nowadays, which means that isolated incidents tend to be given the treatment reserved for the genuinely disgusting when punches and feet flew with casual frequency.

And since there is a player under suspicion for something rare and hard to prove, it is likely that should he be found guilty then the full weight of rugby's penal code will fall on him. For Martin Corry, already within reach of his slippers, that may mean that he has played his last ever game. It's no way to go. In terms of leaving a mark, this would put him in the most stained category.