It’s good that Scotland is heading in the right direction ... now everyone must step up

TWO years ago, the NFL made a change to its rules. ‘ It is a foul if a player lowers his head to initiate and make contact with his helmet against an opponent,’ the new ruling said. ‘ This rule pertains to all players on the field, and to all areas of the field.’

Last year, it made another change. ‘The blindside block is eliminated,’ it said, ‘expanding the protection of defenceless players.

‘It is now prohibited for a blocker to initiate forcible contact with his head, shoulder or forearm when his path is toward or parallel to his own end line.’

So even in the NFL, where big hits are prized as a part of the sport fans love best, the rules evolve and the game changes.

The game is responding to what it now knows and what can be denied no longer. It is adapting to the knowledge it is accruing. It is changing because it cannot ignore the long-term damage done to its players any more.

It is changing because it has no choice.

Three years ago, the largest ever study of cases of American football players with the degenerative brain disease, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) found more evidence of a link between the condition and ‘prior participation in football’.

The study looked at the brains of 111 NFL players and found CTE in 110 of them.

The NFL is changing and now it is time for English football to change, as well.

Our game, too, has the evidence. We have done our best to ignore it for too long but that will not work any more. Not since an exhaustive study by a team at Glasgow University found last year former professional footballers were threeand-a-half times more likely to die from dementia and other serious neurological diseases.

When it emerged last week that the Scottish Football Association was finalising plans to ban children under the age of 12 from heading footballs, there were some predictable laments about it being another victory for the snowflake generation. That’s right, what is the world coming to when you are no longer permitted to take repeated blows to the head that could lead you to develop dementia in later life and cause years of anguish to your family members as they watch you retreat into another world and another persona.

Speak to Chris Sutton about that. His father, Mike, a former professional football er, has dementia that Sutton is convinced stemmed from his time in the game.

Speak to Dawn Astle, too, the daughter of the late West Brom and England striker Jeff Astle, whose perseverance did so much to educate football on the potential dangers of heading t he ball .

Banning players under 12 from heading is a start. They have already done something similar with junior soccer in the US. Some worry that it will compromise an integral part of the game but if kids practise heading with foam balls until they are older, there is no reason why their technique should suffer.

Anyway, football in this country has reached a point where it really can’t afford to do anything else. Morally or financially.

It has been painfully slow to respond. Now, it has to act. In the same way the NFL had to act. Part of English football’s reluctance to confront the issue is almost certainly rooted in financial concerns. By last year, the NFL had already paid more than half a billion dollars to ex-players as part of its concussion settlement.

The Premier League and the Football League might yet find themselves vulnerable to a similar scenario. And that might be just the start of its problems. American football is seeing a fall in participation rates in high schools across the USA as parents grow more and more concerned about the dangers of the sport. The same issues will affect football, and rugby, here.

If football has to change, then it has to change. The alternative — that we soldier blindly on, despite knowing what we know — is simply not viable.