a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Z0GMBaSoOOM/TQX7ux-_ZMI/AAAAAAAAE2o/UC3N0n9jTdk/s1600/paul-oconnell-swingingarm.jpg"img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 350px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Z0GMBaSoOOM/TQX7ux-_ZMI/AAAAAAAAE2o/UC3N0n9jTdk/s400/paul-oconnell-swingingarm.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5550118896914097346" border="0" //aspan style="font-weight: bold;"Munster’s Paul O’Connell saw red within a few minutes of returning to Heineken Cup rugby last night, after a lengthy injury layoff had resigned him to the side lines for six months. The return to action, and the 22-16 win over the Ospreys, was marred though by his swinging arm on Jonathan Thomas. /spanbr /br /British amp; Irish Lions captain O’Connell will face a disciplinary hearing sometime this week that will determine whether or not he receives further punishment after receiving the card for lashing out at Thomas, who was holding him from behind.br /br /The experienced second rower had his back to Thomas and while he pleaded his innocence to referee Christophe Berdos, he unfortunately did catch the Ospreys forward quite badly in the face, causing him to slump to his knees. It didn’t seem malicious, but was reckless, so you’d think that will play probably play in O’Connell’s favour when it comes to the hearing.br /br /If things don’t go well for him though, he could find himself missing the start of the Six Nations, which kicks off in just eight weeks’ time. Munster coach Tony McGahan said after the match they’ll let the process take place and deal with the outcome then.br /br /"We only had a brief look at it. We really haven’t looked at in depth enough to give any real comment. I suppose we saw what everyone else saw, a holding onto the jersey, a reaction towards that.br /br /"We’ll have to let the process take its course and we’ll abide by whatever decision is given."br /br /Ospreys forwards coach Jonathan Humphreys said that O’Connell is not a dirty player, but he will likely miss a ‘large chunk of the season’.br /br /"A similar thing happened to Gavin Henson for a similar incident and unfortunately he got 10 weeks for that," added Humphreys, hinting that O'Connell will be out for some time.br /br /What's your opinion on the red card, and do you think he'll get a hefty suspension?br /br /centerobject width="400" height="288"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/e/f0YW3AYA570?rel=0showinfo=0"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/e/f0YW3AYA570?rel=0showinfo=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="288"/embed/object/centerbr /a href="http://www.rugbydump.com/promos/heinekencup/"img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 395px; height: 80px;" src="http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n291/greiffel/Advertising/400-hcupbanner2.jpg" alt="" border="0" //aspan style="font-size:85%;"span style="font-weight: bold;"WIN tickets /spanto the next round of the Heineken Cup by joining the Rugbydump mailing list. We have tickets to six different matches around the UK, so have a look at which game you'd like to attend, and a href="http://www.rugbydump.com/promos/heinekencup/"enter now!/a/spandiv class="blogger-post-footer"http://www.rugbydump.comimg width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/32316390-1131620928149727073?l=rugbydump.blogspot.com' alt='' //divpa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_LLY6SDhE_e7vcWXkM8rRIFrTQY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_LLY6SDhE_e7vcWXkM8rRIFrTQY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_LLY6SDhE_e7vcWXkM8rRIFrTQY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_LLY6SDhE_e7vcWXkM8rRIFrTQY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare"a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rugbydump?a=WsUGjrShLAA:Cxx_hnmuib0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/rugbydump?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a/divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rugbydump/~4/WsUGjrShLAA" height="1" width="1"/ More...