DEAN Ryan admits he was disappointed by the decision to charge back-rower Richard de Carpentier with ‘eye-gouging’.

The former Leicester Tigers man was cleared of any wrongdoing at a disciplinary hearing in Coventry on Wednesday night following an incident with Northampton Saints’ Callum Clark that was flagged up by the citing commisioner after the Aviva Premiership contest last Saturday.

Although Sixways director of rugby Ryan was always confident his player was innocent, he warned of the possibility of ‘reputational damage’ when such serious charges are involved.

De Carpentier was cited for allegedly “making contact with the eyes/eye area of an opponent contrary to Law 10(4)(m)”, a charge commonly refered to as eye-gouging and regarded as one of the worst and most dangerous acts on a rugby field.

Once his case had been thrown out, de Carpentier was drafted into the Warriors squad to face Biarritz in the Amlin Challenge Cup on Thursday after initially being omitted due to the ongoing disciplinary action.

Speaking after Warriors’ 19-15 defeat to the Top 14 strugglers on Thursday, Ryan said: “RDC’s case was heard and dismissed, so I am pleased that we got him off the charge and pleased that he was free to play against Biarritz, but it was all a bit disappointing.

“We took all the actions to ensure we could represent Richard in the right way because we didn’t feel he deserved to be up in front of the panel.

“There are lots of incidents in a game when people are running around and bumping into each other that things can potentially happen. But when it is a charge as serious as the one against Richard, we need to be careful of what we throw around because there is reputational damage just by the nature of being charged. Once you are cleared, you still have an element of that which sticks to you.

“Nobody wants to be accused of that. It is a really physical game that is played by very physical men and sometimes the boundaries get blurred a little bit, but there are elements of ceratin things that are unacceptable and what Richard was charged with is one of them. None of us want to be charged with those sort of claims and have our parents waking up in the morning to see our names blasted acorss Sky Sports News acussed of it, so we need to be very careful.”