If players are asked to play fewer games, they will likely suffer fewer head injuries, argues Gregor Paul. Photo / Photosport
If players are asked to play fewer games, they will likely suffer fewer head injuries, argues Gregor Paul. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
If, as is beginning to look likely, Super Rugby’s experimental red card laws are adopted for the World Cup, it will be a victory for common sense.
The prospect of allowing referees to show a player a yellow card and leave it to the TMO to determine, within 10minutes, whether it needs to be upgraded to red will be the beginnings of global rugby administrators accepting that a fast-paced collision sport will inevitably have blame-free incidents which result in head impacts.
The differentiation will be particularly important at the World Cup, as hopefully it will ensure that the outcome of knockout games are not determined by something accidental having to be considered foul play just to conform to the inflexibility of the current laws.
But even if this experimental law is adopted in France later this year, it will be only a minor victory in the longer-term battle to balance the conflicting goals of keeping the sport true to its confrontational essence while also making it safer for the athletes.
The real victory for common sense will be rugby administrators accepting that the most impactful way to make the professional game safer, while retaining its core elements, is to restrict the amount of time players can be exposed to collision training, reduce the number of games they play each year, restructure the calendar to allow a longer off-season and, most basic of all, make wearing a mouth guard a mandatory requirement to take the field.
If rugby bosses were guided by those four initiatives, there might at last be some sense that the game is putting sustainable solutions in place to deal with what has threatened to be a crisis from which it can’t escape.
For the last five years, maybe longer, rugby hasn’t been able to keep concussion out of its narrative.
There are former players in the UK taking legal action for head injuries they suffered while playing. There is an increasingly long list of players in New Zealand who have been forced to retire prematurely because of concussion symptoms and, without fail, there are head collisions in almost every major game.
To date, rugby’s administrators have been prepared to tackle the issue through only one means – by introducing a zero-tolerance legislative framework in 2019 to try to drive down tackle heights.
But it’s debatable whether this singular approach is changing player behaviours as there are still head-on-head collisions every week in Super Rugby Pacific.
Referee Angus Gardner shows a red card. Photo / Photosport
Rugby bosses can’t be condemned for altering the laws in the name of player safety, but if they want the fear of brain injuries less dominant in the conversation, and for rugby still to look like rugby as we all know it, then they need to be thinking more radically.
That’s going to require acknowledging the somewhat obvious statistical truth that, if players are asked to play fewer games, they will likely suffer fewer head injuries.
The key to making rugby safer for professional players is asking them to play less. It’s that simple. Fewer games means less training and bodies being exposed to fewer collisions.
Playing less would come with the additional benefit of giving players the longer off-season they have craved, and that in turn would mean fitter athletes who can better execute the core skills of tackle and cleanout.
There’s almost never a silver bullet to a multi-faceted problem, but this is about as close as it gets, as long-suffering fans have been crying out for more quality and less quantity, as well as less controversy caused by inconsistent interpretations and applications of the existing laws as they pertain to head collisions.
But rugby’s executive class continues to believe that the more content the sport can cram into a calendar year, the more it will benefit commercially.
The one thing they absolutely don’t seem to want to do is reduce the number of games.
Why this belief persists is impossible to understand, given the economic carnage inflicted by saturating the global game with content.
Two English Premiership clubs went bust this year and a third may be about to go before the end of the season.
The Welsh Rugby Union is drowning in debt and there is just no level on which it doesn’t make sense for the people running the sport to be thinking about driving higher value from fewer games.
The southern hemisphere has also been gripped with a need to super-size every competition it owns in the face of overwhelming evidence that it’s neither good for the welfare of the players nor the health of the finances.
Common sense enjoys so few victories these days that it would be nice if it could win both at the World Cup and then longer-term with a global shift towards less rugby.
