Honest debate due on dangers of rugby
UNREALISTIC as it was to propose banning tackles in schools’ rugby, the reaction to this suggestion by a number of doctors and academics was worryingly predictable.
Rugby-lovers spoke in unison: the idea was absurd. It would kill the spirit of the game, if not the game itself.
The proposal, in a letter to health ministers and medical officials in Britain and Ireland, was drastic and perhaps designed to be so; the intention may have been to trigger debate by calling for such action.
If so, the plan failed. The issue has not even been up for discussion, blown out of the sky by outraged traditionalists, a group who appear to constitute an unwholesome percentage of the rugby world.
If it is unreasonable to imagine rugby, even at schools’ level, without tackling, it is equally implausible to suppose that the game can continue unchanged as concerns about brain injury grow, and research into this life-changing and potentially fatal condition continues.
There is a view that rugby, like many contact sports, is inherently risky and in trying to remove that risk, the attraction of the sport is removed, too. However, it is reckless to disregard the opinions of 70 medical experts, whose collective experience runs to hundreds of years, on the basis that it is unrealistic to demand such fundamental change in the game.
The matter needs to be properly discussed, but for that to happen, the dangers of rugby need to be honestly recognised by those who profess to love it.