Malcolm O'Kelly looked down, took aim and kicked the Englishman hard in the head… twice.

Malcolm O'Kelly, had planted his size elevens on the prop's head not long before. Vickery was on the wrong side of a ruck, O'Kelly looked down, took aim and kicked the Englishman hard in the head… twice. The touch judge was perfectly positioned, the incident was caught in all its gruesome detail on the television cameras and the French referee decided that the action merited a 10-minute stint in the sin bin. Since the same referee had already binned Leinster winger Rob Kearney for preventing Wasps from taking a quick line-out it is clear that he judges a kick in the head to be more of a misdemeanour than a serious crime.

The crowd were enraged, the commentators were perplexed. The rest of the world then gasped in slack-jawed amazement after O'Kelly, hauled before a disciplinary hearing last week, was banned for two weeks. Two weeks! Had the Irishman kicked someone in the head on Twickenham's High Street instead of the main pitch he would have earned himself a custodial sentence at Her Majesty's pleasure but because he did it on a rugby field he gets a two-week ban from the game.

And this is where Matt Stevens, pictured, comes into the equation. The Bath and England prop is widely expected to be banned for two years for failing a drugs test for a "very serious substance" that, according to Home Office statistics, more than 750,000 people try every year. It is not performance enhancing, Stevens was cheating no one other than himself.Sober analysts write that the South African-born forward will never play for England again and that he will be lucky if Bath don't show him the door but no one has suggested that Stevens should be locked up because, provided he isn't augmenting his salary by dealing in recreational drugs, the police are largely uninterested. They would offer him no more than a slap on the wrist for his use of an illegal drug, if that much.
So a crime that merits a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders and the offer of counselling in the real world is somehow deserving of a two-year ban in rugby's warped universe. Yet a crime that merits a prison sentence in the real world, O'Kelly's kick to Vickery's head, somehow merits nothing more than a two-week ban from the sport. The two judgments can't both be right. Either the entire world has got its ethical knickers in a horrible twist or the game of rugby union has.