Blue card a welcome development

‘‘A human being will get concussed at sixty Gs. A common head-to-head contact on a football field? One hundred G’s. God did not intend for us to play football.’’

Settle down. That’s a quote from the fact-based movie Concussion and the character played by Will Smith, Dr Bennet Omalu, was talking about American football.

Not our own footy, which is surely sanctified even if not quite to the point of enjoying divine protection.

Much as the good doctor’s theology may be dodgy, the science of his case is another matter. This isn’t Hollywood hyperbole.

Sports codes have been insufficiently reactive to the risks and consequences of concussion, including research from Massey University that has found links between traumatic injuries and early onset or faster development of dementia.

Neither should we overlook World Rugby-funded studies from Melbourne’s Monash University that have revealed standard rugby head gear offers no protection from concussion.

New Zealand Rugby has rightly extended to all levels of senior rugby a system, trialled in Northland, under which referees can give players they believe to be showing concussion symptoms a blue card, which will have them stood down for a minimum three weeks.

Good scheme. Much can be made of the fact that referees aren’t doctors but their role does have a safety component, as do the coaches’.

At the professional level, TV cameras offer close scrutiny of most incidents and highly skilled medics are at hand.

At club level, where the stakes in terms of personal injury are every bit as high, it comes down to the calls made by players, coaches and referees.

And this is one issue in which they must all be emphatically on the side of caution.

There is a place in contact sport for tough-guy, soldier-on don’t-let-theteam-down stoicism. But there must also be a vivid awareness of the longterm grief that may await the players and those who care about them.

And that, in turn, means that there must not be a hair-trigger reaction from the sideline that yanks a player from the field before a referee notices.

Players who are blue carded but not, subsequently, diagnosed with concussion by a doctor aren’t then cleared to play, incidentally. The threshold is suspected, not proven, concussion.

If that sounds loopy, the official explanation is that there’s no goldstandard test a doctor can do after a match to reliably diagnose or exclude concussion in their rooms.

Symptoms can be slow to emerge, so a confident clearance can only be given over time. That’s what the three weeks is for.