Former Irish referee boss Owen Doyle has demanded that Eben Etzebeth receives a severe punishment for his eye gouge on Alex Mann.<\/b><\/p>\n
The Springboks star was issued a permanent red card at the end of South Africa\u2019s 73-0 victory after he pressed his thumb into the eye of the Wales flanker.<\/p>\n
Etzebeth<\/a> will now attend a disciplinary hearing which will determine how long he will spend on the sidelines, with the outcome likely to be known on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n The sanctions that can be applied<\/p>\n Intentional or reckless contact with the eye can carry suspensions of up to four years but, if it is only deemed to be \u2018contact with the eye area\u2019, it can be as low as two weeks when mitigation is applied.<\/p>\n There were also suggestions that the 34-year-old may have been retaliating to an eye gouge on him from Mann, with a grainy screenshot of an earlier incident being spread on social media.<\/p>\n However, the Welsh back-rower has not been cited and Doyle has urged the judicial panel which presides over this case to throw the book at the Springbok<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cEben Etzebeth. His thumb in the eye of Wales\u2019 Alex Mann is, unsurprisingly, the talk of the town. Whichever way you look at it, it was an egregious act impossible to mitigate,\u201d he wrote in his Irish Times<\/a> column.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are now suggestions that Etzebeth himself was provoked, that he was the recipient of a prior gouge with some pretty inconclusive video footage doing the rounds.<\/p>\n \u201cBut it cannot be a question of an eye for an eye, that\u2019s a level of retaliation which cannot be acceptable. We\u2019d all be livid if someone poked their finger into our eye, but to actually return the act is unthinkable.<\/p>\n \u201cIf provocation can be proved, then both gouges should be dealt with separately. Rugby cannot afford its judiciary to tread lightly on this one, there\u2019s too much to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n