Dylan Hartley hopes for another final England chance

Hooker was dismissed against Leicester on Saturday

Northampton captain Dylan Hartley is shown the red card and sent off by referee JP Doyle during the Aviva Premiership match between Northampton Saints and Leicester on Saturday (GETTY IMAGES)

It would be an injustice to ignore Dan Cole’s supreme scrummaging for Leicester or Luther Burrell shattering a weak Tigers defence with his heavy, heads-up carrying for Northampton, but the headline-maker from Saturday’s latest edition in a sequence of torrid East Midlands derbies was Dylan Hartley and the red card that may bring a premature end to his career with England.

Northampton won 23-19 to stay top of the Premiership but they did it for the most part without their captain and England hooker who was sent off in the 17th minute after losing his temper and elbowing the Leicester centre Matt Smith in the face.

As Hartley possesses a uniquely cluttered disciplinary record, the England head coach Stuart Lancaster will at the very least be obliged to comment again on his most-capped player’s self-control.

A disciplinary panel on Tuesday will either hand the 28-year-old Hartley the fifth suspension of his 10-year senior career or, just possibly, decide the sending-off to be sufficient. Least likely of all is they will say the referee J P Doyle, acting in conjunction with the television official Sean Davey, got the colour of the card wrong.

The mid-range entry point for striking with the elbow is five weeks’ suspension. England’s next match is in Wales in less than seven weeks’ time: no more combustible assignment could be imagined to kick off a World Cup year, although funnily enough Hartley – in many ways, a pillar of Lancaster’s tenure – dealt brilliantly with playing in Cardiff in 2011.

Hartley has played 61 times for England, 167 times for Northampton in the Premiership and Europe, and this was his second red card. But there have been 14 yellow-card offences including three for England, most recently the petty stamp on South Africa’s Duane Vermeulen last month.

Add in the retrospective citings for gouging, biting and striking with the forearm, plus the punishment for the red-card verbal abuse of the referee in the 2013 Premiership final, and he has accumulated 47 weeks’ worth of bans.

The impression given after that final, when Hartley forfeited his place on the Lions tour with an 11-week ban, was that England were nearing the end of their tether. Lancaster’s assistant coaches Graham Rowntree and Andy Farrell were at Franklin’s Gardens on Saturday looking down on Hartley as he trudged off, almost certainly nursing mixed feelings of being hard done by, as Smith cleared him roughly from a ruck and carried on grappling his neck, and searing regret at allowing his competitive nature to manifest itself in another avoidable act of self-destruction.

It was only last Wednesday, when Hartley turned down a French club and announced a three-year contract extension with Northampton, that he said he hoped to spend the rest of his career with the Saints. This also kept him available for England, who will not pick players based abroad. And Northampton are likely to value his quality all the more after Toulon announced on Saturday they have signed two Saints forwards, Samu Manoa and Salesi Ma’afu, for next season.

Six red cards in this fixture since 2011 have obliged both teams to tailor tactics to being a man down. Northampton took off a centre, Tom Stephenson, to bring on hooker, Mike Haywood, and they scored three second-half tries interspersed by two for Leicester’s Niki Goneva. “At Welford Road a few years back we kept seven forwards on the field and got battered up front,” said Saints boss Jim Mallinder. “You learn from your mistakes.”

Hartley crimesheet

Red cards:

Northampton 2

(v Leicester, December 2014; v Leicester, Premiership final May 2013)

Yellow cards:

England 3

(v South Africa, November 2014; v South Africa, June 2012; v Georgia September 2011)

Northampton 11

(Premiership unless stated: v Sale, March 2014; v Worcester, February 2013; v Exeter, January 2013; v Cardiff Blues, Heineken Cup, December 2010; v Leicester, September 2010; v Gloucester, April 2010; v Saracens, European Challenge Cup, May 2009; v Saracens, September 2008; v Wasps, September 2008; v London Irish, November 2006; v Gloucester, September 2005).