Bracken second of 2003 squad with memory loss
Kyran Bracken has become the second of England’s World Cup-winning team to admit to memory lapses, and has warned of “devastating early onset dementia” through the sport without urgent action.
In parliamentary evidence to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee, the 46-year-old former England scrumhalf called for a series of immediate interventions to tackle rugby’s evolution into “a game of collision and not evasion”. Bracken was in the victorious 2003 England squad with Steve Thompson (inset), who was diagnosed last year with early onset dementia, and told MPS that numerous players were also facing serious health challenges.
“Ex-players have been really struggling,” Bracken said. “Some of the stories are very upsetting. Some of them suicidal. Some of them struggling with dayto-day chores. I had to approach the Rugby Players’ Association because I was forgetting the codes to get into my house. I’d lived there for four years. I’d sent money to people and had no recollection of doing it.
“If the explayers sit down with current players and say, ‘OK, you are in gladiatorial mode but this is what could happen if you carry on playing. You could not be able to hold down a job, not be able to drive properly, inability to converse with people, forgetting words and names’. When it hits home... the current generation will, in my view, change their attitudes.” Addressing the MPS directly, Bracken said: “You need to rattle the cage. You need to make changes. Because we’re going to have a lot of young kids following what is happening on those pitches and we are going to have devastating early onset dementia in the future.” Bracken said that he was knocked out “on many occasions” and suffered between eight and 12 concussions during his career, but that it was only declared when the match was on live television. “Every other time I either played on unable to see the ball out of one eye sometimes, sick at half-time sometimes,” he said. “There was a massive feeling of denial from the players. There was no such thing as education. The culture was ‘stay on the pitch’. The players are bigger and stronger. The ball is in play 30 per cent more than it used to be. There’s more tackles and more head injuries.” Bracken, who is part of the Progressive Rugby group campaigning for change, said that it was “scandalous” that the minimum return to play timeframe following a concussion had been reduced from three weeks to six days. He wants that increased to at least two weeks, limits on contact training and a further evaluation of possible rule changes to minimise risks.
“All the evidence is there right now,” he said. “I don’t want all of us to play tag rugby, but we can do very simple things to make it safer. The current players and current hierarchy need to be educated to understand how bad it can be. It’s a silent killer of this sport.”
Bill Sweeney, the chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, said there were maximum playing limits and that there had been a series of rule changes, including head injury protocols since 2012. “Kyran has a very valid point of view,” he said. “We are open to engaging. Player welfare is central to all that we do.”
Meanwhile, a potentially “groundbreaking” technology for detecting concussion through saliva samples has been developed, which may pave the way for objective, in-game tests. Findings from a study by the University of Birmingham, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, showed specific saliva biomarkers can be used to indicate if a player has been concussed.