Warriors young gun's high tackle charge downgraded

Zyon Maiu’u has had his grade-two reckless high tackle downgraded at an NRL judiciary appearance on Tuesday night.

An early guilty plea would have had him suspended for four weeks with the possibility of it being extended to five had the club’s challenge been unsuccessful.

While Maiu’u was found guilty of the shoulder-to-head contact that resulted in Tigers centre Declan Casey having to be stretchered off the field during Sunday’s trial match in Christchurch, he and the club successfully managed to downgrade the charge from a reckless high tackle grade two to a careless high tackle grade two — halving the resulting penalty to two matches.

That means the Warriors will target round three against the Raiders, also in Christchurch, for Maiu’u to make his NRL debut.

Webster said the club would comment further on the situation once the hearing had taken place, but the initial priority had been ensuring Casey was okay.

“We just wanted to make sure the welfare of the other player was okay; it wasn’t a nice situation getting stretchered off, but we’ll comment more on that in future.”

He said the squad had got around in support of Maiu’u, that he had taken responsibility and was feeling “gutted” because he never wanted anything like that to happen, and was disappointed because he had worked hard in pre-season.

In what was a full evening for the judiciary, Maiu’u was one of 11 players appearing on a charge. The Cowboys v Broncos trial was the only one to not see a player charged.

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission