WHEN Brian Moore called Ireland a team of chokers he was never to know that he would get it wrong on two counts. Ireland performed admirably the week after his comments and routed England out the gate. Two weeks after that it was Scotland who did the choking.

The macabre episode at the end of Ireland's match in Murrayfield painted the day a murky shade of grey. The choice of colour is correct in the sense that nobody died, nobody really knew exactly what happened, nobody was specifically accused of a crime and of course nobody was really surprised that the whole affair was hastily dispatched - the term "put it behind us" really grates with me.

Foul play is a scourge. It propagates itself if the perpetrators go un-punished.

It is my contention that the paper-shufflers in administration don't have the balls to pursue and nail players who have stepped over the line. The rush to park any of these incidents into neutral galls me. There has been a chronology of incidents of foul play dating back to my first memories of the game. If one third of them have been settled in a satisfactory manner I would be astonished. By satisfactory I mean ruthlessly hunting down the perpetrator, dealing with the issue quickly and directly and imposing a sentence well in excess of the necessary sanction.

This latest incident bodes ill for the game. I always get the feeling that the appropriate bodies are more interested in protecting the image of the game than they are of protecting the maligned victims of violence.

I also feel that the rules governing the match commissioner and his duties are vague, ill-conceived, weak and at variance with natural sporting justice. Nor do I have any great confidence in a lot of the appointed citing commissioners - the last thing they seem to want to do is to cite someone. It seems like it's a lot of hassle to roll the sleeves up and do what you're supposed to do. Remember the citing commissioner in the first Lions test in New Zealand? He seemed more concerned about catching his flight home than he was about assessing the case against Keven Mealamu and Tana Umaga.

Let's concentrate on the incident at hand. Firstly I too believe that there was an act of deliberate foul play. I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the bona fides of Eddie O'Sullivan, Ronan O'Gara or his teammates who were close by the scene.

They have no motive or agenda for fabricating any falsehoods. I have no doubt something untoward happened. I might bring to your attention how dangerous it is to interfere with someone's breathing in the course of high-octane sports pursuits.

It is easy to gauge yourself just from looking at players who have been substituted after 60 minutes - they still have quickness of breath five, six, seven minutes after they have left the pitch. The game sucks the lungs out of you and an uninterrupted oxygen supply is vital in terms of just keeping you alive.

Years ago I played against the American Eagles in Atlanta. I made a burst down the pitch and was tap-tackled into a two-inch deep pool of freezing cold water. I was unable to get up and the ruck formed in the pool. My face was pushed into the water for about five or six seconds.

I'm not embarrassed to say I screamed for help as both teams piled in on top of me but luckily managed to get my head out of the water. I was deep-gulping for minutes after it. Had I been there for 30 seconds or so I might have been ghost-writing this piece. Interfering with someone's windpipe or breathing in a rugby match is extremely serious.

Let's hypothesise, because we are onto the real kernel of the issue. Imagine the unthinkable happened and Ronan O'Gara's corpse lay there on the field as the final whistle blew. Brian Fowler's jurisdiction would be superseded by the laws of the state. There would have to be an inquest, a post-mortem too. What would the rugby world say if the coroner had stated that the cause of death was not due to, say, a haemorrhage from a blow to the head or a Cormac McAnallen sudden death syndrome but in fact to asphyxia? How could they explain that away? They wouldn't be sweeping this one away under the carpet. There would be clever lawyers who could put a case forward that no one could disprove that it could have been one of his own team-mates who might have been responsible. There is no body and so the rugby fraternity are quite happy to fudge and hope it goes away quickly. The whole complexion of the incident would change.

No one would be saying "we'd like to put this incident behind us and focus on the French/Italian game". Do you know why?

Because all the matches would be bloody well cancelled, that's why.

The game of rugby union would change forever.

Jack Nicholson scored a great line in the movie The Departed. The boys in blue were hounding him saying they had enough evidence to put him away, his retort, "if ya coulda, ya woulda". He could smile at them, he knew they had nothing on him.

This is the galling factor - 15 TV cameras, 50 photographers with cameras, one referee, two touch judges and one TMO - yet still no conclusive proof of anything.

Imagine though that there was irrefutable filmographic evidence - a life ban? They wouldn't have the balls. No, more likely a ban which would probably end the day before the opening ceremony of the 2007 World Cup. But certainly Frank Hadden would not be half as flippant as he has been the last couple of days. In my opinion I don't think he has handled the matter with any great professionalism and I think he has shown a good deal of disrespect to the Irish team. If he put himself in O'Sullivan's shoes I don't think he would appreciate the response he got.

In the game of golf and in snooker, professionals regularly call fouls or penalties on themselves. It is an honour-bound code which is almost unique in sport. Self-regulation I suppose.

A coach should be able to ask his player "did you do it son?" and get an honest response. We like to look across the sport-