Gregor Paul: Paranoia about head knocks killing rugby

Referee Angus Gardner sends Highlanders flanker Liam Squire to the sin bin. Photo / AP

With the latest research out of the NFL showing yet more alarming figures about the extent of brain injuries suffered by former players, rugby has to continue its vigilance in protecting the heads of all those who play.

But it must also ask whether it is willing to destroy the game - certainly cripple the essence of it - by making blanket rulings about all collisions where someone's head is impacted.

It's a difficult line to tread, but what choice does the game have because the way things are heading, rugby is almost untenable.

Referees and more importantly TMOs seem to be terrified to apply common sense or any leniency in their adjudication of collisions in which the tackler makes any kind of contact with the tackled player's head.

World Rugby clearly wants this to be a black and white area but unfortunately for them, it's not. There are definite shades of grey in this and it's frankly ridiculous to not understand that in the course of an intensely competitive 80 minutes, there will be instances where heads are struck neither deliberately nor recklessly, but simply because when 30 super charged athletes are moving at speed and determined to stop one another, there will be unfortunate consequences.

No one in officialdom currently wants to accept that, though, and instead there appears to be neither the ability nor desire to be empathetic or understanding of the nature of the game.

But that has to change and it has to change immediately or the Rugby Championship could be reduced to farce.

The games will be fast, intense and committed and if the officials panic, see all head collisions as the same, then there could be a procession of players being sent to the bin, or sent off.

The last few weeks have demonstrated quite clearly how desperate the situation is - how spooked referees have become, working to an inflexible edict rather than using their initiative and instinctive feel for the situation.

For all the mistakes he made in the second test between the All Blacks and British & Irish Lions, Jerome Garces got one thing bang on - which was that Sonny Bill Williams deserved a red card.

His was a challenge that the tightened rules around head collisions were set up to punish. His timing was wrong, his technique poor and the consequences of that could have been dire.

But in the third test, Jerome Kaino was yellow carded when his arm, swinging in to wrap around Alun Wyn Jones, caught the big lock in the face.

Jones was already falling, Kaino already committed to the tackle and while it all looked terrible on the slow motion replays, it was a legitimate action by Kaino that had an unintended consequence for the Welshman.

The yellow card came because it was deemed to be reckless, but that seems to be the easy-out interpretation for referees. They brand almost everything reckless when there is, in the wording of the law, provision to rule a head contact as accidental.

That same near paranoid decision-making was witnessed in Christchurch last week as well when Angus Gardner, such an excellent referee otherwise, yellow carded Liam Squire for a contact on Richie Mo'unga.

Highlanders coach Tony Brown called it soft and no one should disagree. The decision making process seemed to go like this - head contact, panic, yellow card.

In the weeks to come that process needs a pause. It needs for officials to sensibly determine when a player has been guilty of poor technique or recklessness and when they have made a legitimate attempt to make a legal tackle but through unexpected circumstances, have made contact with the head.