British broadcaster Piers Morgan has challenged renewed efforts to ban contact sports like rugby from British schools.
Professor Allyson Pollock is urging schools to remove tackling from rugby because she said it is too dangerous.
Pollock and Graham Kirkwood from the Institute of Health at Newcastle University writein a leading medical journal that most injuries in youth rugby occur due to the collision of elements in the game.
Morgan, host of Good Morning Britain, suggests obesity is a far greater threat to young people.
"What about the flipside of playing rugby at school? Where actually it keeps these kids on the straight and narrow, keeps them from doing bad stuff. They're very fit and they're not obese. They're not putting a drain on society," Morgan said while interviewing Professor Pollock.
It echoes comments made by international referee Nigel Owens on the Mike Hosking Breakfast yesterday.
Owens, who took charge of the 2015 Rugby World Cup final, was blunt in his response. Owens wonders what will happen next, banning walking to school.
They will want to ban walking to school next. And only rubber pens and pencils to be used in class. What is the world coming too. https://t.co/CYMmk6WSgt
Owen's told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking on the Mike Hosking Breakfast that the most important thing in youth rugby is that players are trained properly.
"I'm right quite sure what the benefits of it will be. The most important thing in the game is player safety, which is paramount in all levels of the game, particularly young people. When the kids are coached properly, to do their tackling techniques, the scrum is made as safe as it possibly could, the rugby environment that the kids play in, the safety aspect it is all done to minimalize as much as one can in a physical contest in a sport like rugby the risks of injury," the Welshman told Hosking.
"Unfortunately in contact sports there is an element of risk. There is an element of risk in riding your bike, there is an element of risk in playing any other sport. There is an element of risk playing with your mates on the yard during lunch time in school. So what World Rugby has done over the years and the governing bodies as well is done all they can to minimize that risk as much as it possibly can in the nature of the game that rugby is. I don't think see how taking tackling out of the game is going to have a much more negative response to people being involved in the game than it is a positive response to the game."
Owens says where the research comes from makes a big difference.
"Where have they done the research? Have they done it in a country where coaching is of the top quality and the risks are minimized in that way. What country have the facts and figures come from? To can put a fact or figure to any side of the argument you want to put across.
"You won't find an argument from anymore that there is an element of risk in contact sports. But then there is more risk is people getting fatal accidents on bicycles. There is more risk with a child with obesity and more risk to the health of a child not participating in an active sport when he's sitting in front of a television, eating a pizza, drinking sugary drinks and playing PlayStation for hours and hours and not exercising his body. That is a fact. There is more risks for the ill health of a child that way than there is playing a physical or contact sport like rugby is."
