Stu M wrote:
I've no problem with not being agreed with. But since my initial post on the first page of this thread I've had "how high is your horse" "snowflake", "Saints fans making mountain out of molehills, "crying over nothing" etc so not really the same is it?
Secondly, my user name on Red Vee isn't Stu M so you wouldn't know my posts anyway. And FWIW in my opinion Hohaia was out unconscious when the second punch landed, he wasn't moving and had no way of defending himself, not sure how you can deny that? We don't know if that single punch ended his career do we but it didn't help!
If we are being pedantic also, if you watch the game back Flower makes first contact with Hohaia running back which leads to Hohaia's intial (admittedly) cheap shot
Your opinion is irrelevant Stu, with all due respect. He wasn't unconscious. Go and watch the footage again before commenting further and you'll see he wasn't even unconscious AFTER the second punch, let alone before it. He was raising his right arm before Flower landed the 2nd blow (something you can't do if you're unconscious) and he's clearly conscious whilst the melee is going on after the 2nd punch is landed.
I can also say with absolute authority that the single blow didn't end his career, because the research tells us so. By a quirk of fate I was researching a court case that involved head trauma at the time of this incident and had been studying the research coming out of America on the effects of players in the NFL. The research (which ran into millions of dollars) conclusively concluded that the type of symptoms Hohaia was claiming was not caused by a single impact but by contusions caused across multiple smaller impacts. We already knew that Hohaia had suffered multiple concussions during his career and had to miss many games because of the after effects of these impacts. In addition he played on for 6 months of the following season so unless you're suggesting the Saint Helens club were negligent in their behaviour and hadn't sought or adhered to medical advice and protocols then we can confidently draw the conclusion that this didn't end his career.
If you want to say it didn't help then that's fine. But neither would Saints playing him afterwards. In fact, of the two, I think it fair to say that the latter was worse than the former.
As for the last part of your post; that is the most Saints centric thing I've read and contradicts your objections here. If you think that a push in the back warrants a player running 15 metres to elbow someone in the face, then surely you have no objection to the further escalation that Flower was then guilty of. You can't have it both ways.
