Paul Lewis: Lifting law has to be tackled

The broken neck suffered by Newcastle's Alex McKinnon last week should prompt a rules rethink by the NRL. Photo / Getty Images

In a club rugby game in the UK years ago, I was kicked in the back — deliberately — by a big Welsh lock as I shielded the ball in a ruck. The kick was so hard that, for a few seconds, I couldn't feel my legs.

In those brief instants, I felt the same kind of panic that Newcastle rugby league forward Alex McKinnon displayed when he broke his neck in a lifting tackle against the Melbourne Storm this week. It will be no comfort to McKinnon — whose career is over; he was placed in an induced coma after surgery and his ambulatory future is unknown — but the disturbing pictures which accompanied his injury may yet perform a service.

They may persuade all oval ball codes to ban the lifting tackle rigorously. There's only one way to do this — make the penalty so harsh that teams and players are persuaded never to do it. An automatic red card for any or all involved in the tackle, plus an automatic five-match ban, should deal with it. It'll stop then.

League's response to this alarming incident will be interesting. So far, the sport has covered itself with about as much glory in its handling of the McKinnon drama as Malaysia Airlines did with MH370.

Everyone agrees: the players involved in the tackle meant no harm. But the fact remains that when you lift a man off the ground, he loses much, if not all, the ability to control his descent and his landing. The rule is that a lifting tackle — where the ball carrier is lifted off his feet — should never take the man past the horizontal. Easier said than done. The tacklers may not intend to drop anyone on their head and neck but when you have 250-300kg of prime NRL beef wrestling the ball carrier to the ground, things may not always go according to intention.

Both rugby and league apply an instant penalty when the horizontal rule is breached. As we have now seen, that is cold comfort for McKinnon and others who went closer to the vertical. Brian O'Driscoll's ended tour after the tackle by Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu during the 2005 Lions rugby series comes to mind. Again, the tacklers didn't have damage in mind; they may not even have meant to tip O'Driscoll up. But damage was done anyway.

Rugby has made a better job of ridding the game of the tip tackle. It is rarely seen these days. League has made sympathetic noises about McKinnon's plight but no one has come out and proposed a scenario which might end the threat. In fact, the sport seems almost to want to keep the danger.

Melbourne captain Cameron Smith — by all accounts a decent bloke and one of the top players on the planet — defended the tacklers, pointing out that McKinnon's action in ducking his head as he reached the ground contributed to the injury. He was reported to have told the referee at the time: "I don't want to see that happen to anyone in our game but if he doesn't duck his head, it doesn't happen."

Smith's comments were not intended for general consumption but they sounded insensitive; as if the victim should have behaved differently. It's like saying a boxer wouldn't have been hit if he had moved his head; or a mugging victim wouldn't have been mugged if his wallet had been surrendered.

Players expressed sympathy for all involved and some, like Bronco Sam Thaiday, reflected on how a career could be ended and a life changed by such an accident. Sorry, but these are just philosophical niceties.

Former NRL coach Roy Masters, in his newspaper column in Australia, implied the accident was because the players were seeking different ways to slow down the play-the-ball now that the "cannonball tackle" (when a tackler throws himself at the knees of the ball carrier) had been outlawed.

"Had there been no rule preventing the third man attacking the knees, it is likely he would have gone into the tackle around the legs, rather than join his other two partners in an unstable and potentially dangerous dance with McKinnon," Masters wrote. "Put crudely, even cruelly, the NRL must ask what is more crucial: protecting a player's knees, or his spine?"

Why not both? League sometimes glories overmuch in its "hard man" tag. Players and fans alike revel in the code's primal, physical ethic. To be fair, the NRL has outlawed shoulder charges, chicken wing tackles and the cannonball on safety grounds. But the lift tackle also has to go; there has to be a severe clampdown — not just a collection of sad pleasantries, shrugged shoulders and "it's a physical game" sophistry.

Thaiday also said players were trying to slow the game: "The rules change every year, so teams are trying to figure out a way to get players on the ground and slow the game down a little bit, because the game is being played at a blistering pace at the moment."

Slowing the game is illegal — past a certain point anyway. So the NRL needs either to hit sides hard for doing so or re-address the new rules which everyone says have helped make the game faster. Increase the interchange bench and substitutions allowed — but make sure spines are protected as much as they can be.

A man's neck has been broken, in a way that will not help the growth of the sport. I got up and ran around happily after that kick in the spine, with no ill effects. McKinnon didn't. His recovery will likely take two years. Time for a change.