a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z0GMBaSoOOM/TNhmPu7vDKI/AAAAAAAAEwQ/EBpvLe0Ey3A/s1600/mealamu-headbutt-moody.jpg"img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 350px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z0GMBaSoOOM/TNhmPu7vDKI/AAAAAAAAEwQ/EBpvLe0Ey3A/s400/mealamu-headbutt-moody.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5537288162334674082" border="0" //aspan style="font-weight: bold;"All Blacks hooker Keven Mealamu will face a IRB judicial hearing in Glasgow tomorrow after he was cited for headbutting England’s Lewis Moody at Twickenham on Saturday. If found guilty of striking with the head, it will no doubt be the end of Mealamu’s tour. /spanbr /br /While it wasn’t clear at first view, telelvision replays surfaced randomly a full five minutes after the incident took place as Moody looked groggy and appeared to be worse for wear from ‘something’. What the replays revealed were Mealamu holding onto the England flanks jersey, then driving into the back of his head with his own.br /br /Citing commissioner John West of the IRB charged the New Zealand hooker with ‘striking with the head’ on Sunday, leading to a possible suspension that would see him out of the game for at least a month if found guilty.br /br /All Blacks coach Graham Henry has come out in defense of Mealamu, saying he’s one of the cleanest players in the world. British amp; Irish Lions fans may well disagree with that after an incident involving Brian O’Driscoll in 2005 that still gets brought up on regular occasion.br /br /Moody has since been suffering from ‘general soreness’ so England have brought in Tom Wood as cover ahead of their meeting with Australia this coming Saturday.br /br /a href="http://rugbydump.blogspot.com/2010/07/bakkies-botha-suspended-for-nine-weeks.html"Bakkies Botha/a was handed a nine week ban for his headbutt on Jimmy Cowan in the Tri Nations, which doesn’t bode well for Mealamu as this appeared to be fairly similar.br /br /An interesting aspect of this incident is the way that the commentators from the two countries had such different reactions. The English commentators naturally expressed what they saw, while there was deathly silence in the New Zealand commentary box.br /br /Grant Nisbett in particular was one of the most outspoken during the Botha incident. "Not the smartest thing to do.. a headbutt into the span style="font-style: italic;"back/span of the head," he said at the time. There was also a bit of talk back then about replays being shown over and over. It looks like the Sky Sports producers have taken a leaf out of their NZ colleagues’ book.br /br /For interest’s sake, this video features both versions as it's probably quite amusing to some of you. Regarding the suspension though, is this as clear cut as the Botha headbutt, or could there be some kind of other explanation for what Mealamu was doing?br /br /centerobject height="288" width="400"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/J0o8XQ3In30?fs=1amp;hl=en_GBamp;rel=0"param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/J0o8XQ3In30?fs=1amp;hl=en_GBamp;rel=0amp;showinfo=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="288" width="400"/embed/object/centerbr /div style="text-align: center;"span style="font-size:85%;"span style="font-weight: bold;":: Related Posts ::/spanbr /a href="http://rugbydump.blogspot.com/2010/07/bakkies-botha-suspended-for-nine-weeks.html"Bakkies Botha suspended for nine weeks after headbutt on Jimmy Cowan/abr //span/divspan style="font-size:85%;"span style="font-weight: bold;"Time:/span 01:53span style="font-weight: bold;"br //span/spandiv class="blogger-post-footer"http://www.rugbydump.comimg width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/32316390-5580113596272055196?l=rugbydump.blogspot.com' alt='' //divdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rugbydump?a=i5m7JH0GNiA:pK7x_yuhilw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rugbydump?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rugbydump/~4/i5m7JH0GNiA" height="1" width="1"/ More...