IS IT TIME FOR KING HENRY TO HANG UP HIS BOOTS?—
LANGUAGE is a powerful thing, you know. For example, if the doctor approached you in his surgery, placed his hand on your shoulder and informed you that you had been diagnosed with onychocryptosis, what would race through your head?
Me? I only drink from a halfempty glass anyway so I would automatically assume the worst, turn a deaf year to the medic and lean heavily on my own diagnostic skills, which are framed in the absolute belief that if it is unpronounceable then it has to be incurable.
I would have already in my head started penning the first draft of the bucket list — at the top of it a reunion of the St Michael’s/Skellig Rangers minor championship winning team of 1983 given the unforgivable oversight of the South Kerry Board not to have taken it upon themselves to honour this team of the ages — before asking the good doctor if there was a support group where I could go to share my pain, only to be informed that even in these hyper-sensitive times sufferers of ingrown toenails tended to battle on bravely alone.
Of course, it rolls the other way as well. Show us a player being stretchered off with a shattered leg and we will recoil with horror, a player clutching his knee and we will offer a silent prayer that it is the medial and not the cruciate. But show us one who is concussed and we file it away in the ‘see you next week’ bracket.
Concussion? We tend to think of it as a place somewhere between sobriety and drunkenness, a fogginess of the mind that will clear with a good night’s sleep.
We really should ban the word, and use the language of doctorland where it is referred to as a mild traumatic brain injury, which as it happens does exactly what it says on the tin.
PERHAPS if Jim McGuinness, a man who does not normally struggle with language, had claimed l ast Saturday evening that four of his players had suffered mild traumatic brain injuries in three games, Ciarán Whelan — an analyst on RTÉ’s Sunday Game who in fairness is normally rooted to good sense rather than the sound-bite — would not have dismissed the Donegal manager’s comments as part of the ‘silly season’.
In Whelan’s defence, perhaps his comments were influenced by the circumstantial. It took McGuinness a week to reveal his fury at the tackle by Monaghan’s Stephen Gollogly that left Mark McHugh concussed, with a perforated eardrum and a badly injured quad muscle, so in one way it was easy to assume the Donegal boss was out to set an agenda before this weekend’s All-Ireland quarter-finals.
He was, after all, asked about that tackle i n the immediate aftermath of the game and had nothing bad to say about it, but you suspect that was because he simply had not realised at the time how bad it was.
None of us did. From the press box, Gollogly’s hit in real time looked borderline late, its crudeness blurred by the manic ferocity in which the opening minutes of the Ulster final was played. More importantly, that was how David Coldrick viewed it as well and Goll ogly’s departure, along with McHugh’s, added to the sense that there was nothing more to see here, move on now please.
It even ended up on the cutting room floor of RTÉ’s Sunday Game and perhaps that was the most disturbing thing of all. It was a tackle of the football times we live in; so ordinary that even though it left the two players involved unfit to continue, none of us really felt compelled to look at it again.
Brain trauma is a deadly serious issue
We really should have; Gollogly is yards off McHugh who is about to take control of the ball, so in terms of competing for the ball, from the Monaghan player’s perspective he was in a 10/90 race for possession. His challenge reflects that, ploughing into the side of McHugh’s head with his own face — we assume that was the point of contact that caused the perforated ear- drum — and McHugh doesn’t fall to the ground, he crashes to the pitch in a helpless, vulnerable heap.
You look at that tackle, and you can make one of three calls. It was accidental, deliberate or just plain reckless. We reckon it was the latter, and if it was then Gollogly should have been shown red.
Our horror should not be conditional on the fact that McHugh sustained injuries so traumatic in nature that one would associate them with a car accident rather than a sports pitch, because every head injury, every incident of brain trauma, demands to be taken deadly serious.
Junior Seau played in the NFL for the Dolphins, the Patriots and the Chargers, and after he retired in 2009 he was diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CPE), a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head. He committed suicide last year, his depression linked to a disease that is a by-product of concussion.
Currently his family is one of about 6,000 that has filed a classaction law suit against the NFL, and the medical evidence that has been collated is chilling.
Players who suffer from concussion tend to be more vulnerable to getting re-concussed, and in later life it can lead to mental health issues, ranging from depression to dementia. Studies have shown that players who have been concussed three times see their chances of suffering from Alzheimer’s increase five-fold.
We are training our players to become faster, stronger and fitter, we have game plans that are designed to be destructive, we are no longer using the language of rugby, we’re playing that way.
The evidence is before us. Last year 150 i nter- county players responded to a GPA survey — part of an initiative with the acquired brain injury association — where 54 per cent revealed that they had suffered f rom concussion and almost half of those (44 per cent) had been concussed between two and five times in their careers.
Already this season, we have seen Clare’s John Conlon hospitali sed when his blood pressure reached dangerously high levels after he was allowed to play on concussed. In the fallout to Henry Shefflin’s sending off on Sunday, it may have gone under the radar that in back-to-back All-Ireland quarter-finals Richie Power has been taken off with concussion — albeit it accidentally when he was hit by his own player on Sunday.
Concussions are a fact of life in any contact sport, but that does not mean we stand idly by and embrace it fatalistically.
It demands a multi-pronged response. It demands a proper protocol to deal with concussed players on match day — is it not perverse that a player can be taken off and replaced temporarily with a bloody nose but when there is a need to assess if a player is suffering from trauma to the brain the same courtesy is not afforded?
It also means that referees should not take heat for cautioning players, who either by design or recklessness, inflict or threaten to inflict a brain injury — in fact, it demands they take action every time.
Above all, and this was the thrust of McGuinness’s argument aimed at the ears of his fellow managers, Championship intensity is all well and good, but it is a long way from life and death.
And to ignore that message would not just be silly, it would be tragic.