The Liam Farrell Column: Punishment fits the crime in this case

A lot of people have been talking this week about the five-game ban handed to Warrington's Declan Patton for his high shot on Hull FC's '¨Bureta Faraimo.
Liam FarrellLiam Farrell
Liam Farrell

Okay, the tackle looked more sloppy than malicious. I don’t think Declan’s gone to deliberately knock his opponent out, but the ban and the red card were right.

These things need stamping out.

You just can’t be doing things like that anymore and you’re going to get disciplined. It’s how it needs to be.

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Some might say the ban was on the harsh side but there has to be a standard when it comes to punishing foul play – and the important thing is that has to be the standard for everyone.

You can’t have different punishments for people for the same things so if it happens again there has to be the same punishment.

Bureta has had an unlucky couple of weeks. He got knocked out by Marshy (Liam Marshall) when we beat them a couple of weeks ago in Australia and that was a bad one for him.

But that wasn’t the only red card Ben Thaler gave out in the game.

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My mate Dom Crosby got hit with a pretty comical headbutt from Liam Watts.

I’m pretty good friends with Dom so I spoke to him about that.

I don’t know how Liam didn’t come off worse from headbutting Dom!

If you’re going to headbutt

Dom Crosby you will have

to do it a bit harder than

that.

But fair play for Dom for keeping his head cool. A lot of people would have reacted.

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Liam Watts will admit it was stupid what he did – it’s not good on his record but I’m sure Dom’s happy he didn’t react.

Those two incidents have been unfortunate for Hull but I’m sure they will be happy with their performance. Beating Warrington 21-12 is a good result by anyone’s standards.

For us, we’re looking to build on our game against Widnes – or at least the second half.

Actually we thought we started the game pretty well but a few things happened like we’d give a penalty away down their end and give them a bit of field position.

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We had 10 minutes without the ball and it put us in a bad position for when we were 16 points down.

In the second half we came out with a different mentality, we started to roll them a bit and we were impressed we scored 28 unanswered points.

Hopefully we can use that to stop Wakefield in their tracks this Sunday.

They’re definitely building something and they’ll be getting some confidence having gone four from four.

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Last year they finished pretty well – above us – and it’s not been mentioned but they put a bit of a number on us by beating us 32-0 in the last game of 2017.

So this is a big game for us and we want to knock them off that winning streak and keep our good performances up, because we have started the season pretty well apart from the blip against

Warrington.