Doctor’s orders: we have to

still an element of personal responsibility.

Barclay, pictured, revealed that he passed all the returnto-play tests at his club Scarlets weeks after suffering a head knock, but still didn’t feel right himself and stood himself down for a bit longer.

“That’s the interesting thing with concussion,” said Robson. “You can have one where you do pass all the things that we do and John was entirely right. That’s why we are beefing up the educational aspect. One of the things I put in last year was ‘protect yourself and protect your team-mate’.

“Because the players are now key to spotting concussion. I could get a player coming up to me at pitchside and saying ‘so and so isn’t right Doc, he needs to come off’. You ask why and they say ‘well, he never gets the lineout codes wrong and he just has. Twice’.

“With both of the head injuries I dealt with in Dublin this year [to Blair Kinghorn and Ryan Wilson] it was the coach who passed on important information he’d spotted watching on the TV screen. Which is great. That wouldn’t have happened five years ago. It’s got to be better.”

Every Six Nations team went into this year’s tournament with big injury lists and missing high-profile stars, which focused the debate on rugby’s general injury issue, with most professional clubs being without around a quarter of their squad at the height of the season. “It should never be accepted,” said Robson. “We’ve got to look at the game, as we have with concussion. It’s hard to envisage a contact sport where injury is not going to be a factor but we should not accept high levels of injury. We’ve got to ask why are they occurring.”

Scotland had a specific raft of front-row injuries this season but Robson believes this was bad luck rather than any systemic issues due to the wide variation of the problems, from the standard neck problems that are common for front-rowers, to WP Nel’s broken arm, to Zander Fagerson dropping a weights bench on his foot. New coaching teams took over at Scotland, Glasgow and Edinburgh last summer, which Robson suggests could, blamelessly, have led to a temporary increase.

He said: “There is a really interesting stat which came out of Australia which highlighted that whenever you get a new coaching set-up, the following season there is a spike in injuries and then it slowly comes down to the norm