Time Out by Simon_Doyle

As someone who could never understand the hand-off in rugby, especially when it involved someone poking their finger in your eyes, I fully understand what it's like to have an unwelcome finger in your eye socket.

I have, however, never suffered someone doing their best to burst my eye and relieve it of its inappropriately named aqueous humor (that's your eye fluid for those of you who never paid attention in biology class other than when sex education was the topic of discussion).

So then, after criticising feeble FIFA the other day for their failure to deal with cheating of one kind, I'm for once going to give praise (not often that a miserable sod like me does that) to the RFU after they handed out a cracking good 70-week ban to Stade Francais prop David Attoub for eye gouging.

The gouging in question, which occurred in a Heineken Cup game against Ulster, saw the Frenchman let his nimble fingers go to work on the eye of Ulster flanker Stephen Ferris in one of the worst examples of eye gouging you are ever likely to see. The suspension will see Attoub sitting it out in on the naughty stair until April 2011. Now that's ample time for him to think about what he's done wrong.

And he'll also have company as his team-mate Julien Dupuy is serving a 23-week suspension for another gouging offence in the same match - which was also carried out upon poor old hooker Ferris. They must bloody have something against him.

The ban on Attoub is not, however, the longest ever meted out in rugby. That dishonour goes to Colomiers prop Richard Nones who was given a two-year suspension in 1999 for serious gouging. Let's hope if Stade insist on appealing against the length of Attoub's ban that the RFU increase it further for the sheer folly of such an appeal.