Former England prop and rugby pundit David Flatman has come out in defence of Dan Biggar after the Wales fly-half was involved in an altercation with an abusive fan.
Northampton playmaker Biggar was shown a red card for a high tackle on Lions team-mate Chris Harris during the Saints' Challenge Cup defeat to Gloucester. However, it seems that the Wales skipper was subjected to abuse from a member of the crowd as he headed towards the sidelines and took up a position for the rest of the match.
Biggar, allegedly, was unable to brush it off and exchanged verbals before stewards intervened. Details of the incident have been posted to a blog run by Ashley Tuala, the wife of Biggar's Northampton team-mate Ahsee.
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In his column for RugbyPass+, Flatman, who now works as a commentator for BT Sport and ITV, recalled his own experiences of dealing with abusive fans as he defended Biggar.
He wrote: "Why shouldn’t a player react? Eric Cantona took things a bit far, I’ll grant you, but what is it about being paid to play sport that means I can’t react to someone hurling visceral abuse at me?
"Perhaps paying for a ticket makes some folks feel like they have a right – a level of ownership – to do what they want. But compare the £50 a punter pays to the graft and sacrifice that goes into the average week of a professional player in the week leading into a match.
"Fans don’t all have to be cheerleaders; they don’t need to smile and laugh every minute they spend in the ground, but they need to not insult players from a distance and expect to get away with it. Personally I’m glad Dan Biggar stuck up for himself, and I hope the gobs***e who shouted all those awful things at him gets hammered for it.
"It may be an unfashionable view, but ho-hum."
He also questioned whether players' attitudes towards officials had fed into the psyche of fans, affording them permission to speak to players in a similar tone.
"Perhaps coincidentally, Biggar himself – by his own admission – can go pretty hard at referees during games, and there might be a correlation here between his behaviour and how that makes observers gauge how he himself can be treated," added Flatman.
"This is tenuous at best in this case, but the notion of permission by accepted behaviour is sufficiently real that referees this season are noticeably taking a harder line when it comes to backchat."
