IT’S OVER a decade since Leo Cullen played under Richard Cockerill at Leicester Tigers but the controversy whipping around the rival coaches’ old club this week made for an obvious narrative as their sides square off in the Guinness PRO14 this evening.

The sending-off of Will Spencer, who made contact with the head of Wasps’ Tommy Taylor in an attempted tackle during Leicester’s loss in Coventry last weekend, wasn’t the story. It was the reaction of the Tiger’s interim head coach Geordan Murphy that stole the headlines.

The Irishman has since rowed back completely on his post-match assertion that Spencer’s red card was a sign that the game has become

“too PC” but his initial take prompted a ripple of debates around how rugby tackles safety and, particularly, concussion.

The first point to make about Cullen’s take is that he prefaced everything with the statement that safety is the absolute priority. The Leinster head coach insisted the onus was on them as a club to work on tackle technique, to adapt to new laws and educate themselves in every way.

Yet Spencer’s case — seeing red for an attempted tackle that, while poorly executed, clearly carried no malice — has given rise to the argument that there could be some middle ground between zero tolerance and anything that sniffs of leniency.

“You have me a little bit stumped,” said Cullen. “Yeah, it is a difficult one to say with absolute clarity because what’s the mitigating factors in any situation? How much mitigation does the referee... I mean, what sort of leniency is he allowed in terms of making decisions?

“There has to be a little bit of sympathy if something is accidental, that would be my view.

“But then, on the other hand, that sometimes does create confusion because players want to have a consistency of message, but — and there is a big ‘but’ there — it is very hard to say.”

“You need to show me the examples and then we can make some decisions based on those.”

Therein lies the rub.

Cullen, scrum-half Luke McGrath and team manager Guy Easterby actually looked at footage of an incident similar to Spencer’s — which one they didn’t say — just prior to yesterday’s press duties and couldn’t come to any agreement on how to adjudicate on it.

Rugby, as Cullen said, is a chaotic, complicated game so it is hard not to conclude that zero tolerance is the only viable approach until the culture changes and outbursts such as Murphy’s last weekend are erased from the dressing-rooms as well as the TV screens.

Among the sub-issues to arise from the last week’s introspection is the concern that players could choose to milk the issue by ducking into tackles so that contact is made much higher up. Cullen, unsurprisingly, is keen to avoid that sort of scenario.

“We try to help the process, to help the spectacle become better, because we don’t want to see cynical behaviour or what you’re talking about, which is rugby values [being damaged], because it’s important that we’re still instilling the right values in the game.

“That’s what the game should be, it shouldn’t be about play-acting.”

Cockerill spoke about finding a balance in ensuring safety without compromising in physicality when asked similar questions earlier this week and the latter was in no short supply when his Edinburgh side accounted for Connacht at Murrayfield last weekend.

The Englishman has left a number of Scottish internationals out of today’s squad — Blair Kinghorn, Henry Pyrgos, Grant Gilchrist, WP Nel and Stuart McInally among them — but that has been countered to some extent by the selection of a beefy front five in particular.

“They’ve got some big bodies in there,” said Cullen.

Leinster won’t bat an eyelid at that. The league and European champions have made seven personnel changes to the side that walloped Dragons last Saturday. They start with 13 Ireland internationals, James Lowe on the wing and Max Deegan at blindside flanker.

Jonathan Sexton calls the shots for the second week in a row at ten and a strong bench boasts Tadhg Furlong, Sean Cronin, Jamison Gibson-Park, Ross Byrne, as well as Dan Leavy who starts his first game of the season after injury during Ireland’s summer tour to Australia.

Another home win.