RFU report damning on head injury dangers
The English RFU has called for new rules to counter head injuries in rugby. Owen Slot reports.
THE message from the English RFU was admirably blunt. It came in the form of a 53-page report, a blizzard of graphs and statistics and, then, what appeared to be a clear conclusion: we are trying very hard to make professional rugby as safe as possible, but we are not yet succeeding.
The RFU’s annual injury audit, entitled the Professional Rugby Injury Surveillance Project (PRISP), is a considerable piece of work. It logs every injury, its severity, how the injury happened, and plenty more information besides. No other union in the world measures the risk in the professional game as accurately or diligently as the RFU.
The information in the report this week was – let’s face it – peppered with worrying news. As the sport’s governing body in England, the promoters of rugby and guardians of the future of the game, it might therefore have been tempting to sugarcoat it. Or brush it as far under the carpet as possible.
How commendable that, instead, the message was: yes, we’ve got a problem. And more than that: we can’t solve it on our own.
No one attempted to say: ‘‘It’s not that bad, don’t worry.’’ There were some positive elements in the report, such as the fact that the number of concussions last season dropped, but the RFU and its partners in the annual audit, the Rugby Players’ Association and Premier Rugby, barely focused on this.
The fall in concussions equates to one fewer such injury every eight games. This could have been the message: look, everything we are doing is starting to work. Instead the message was: the severity of our concussions, like the severity of injuries generally, has got worse. A straight set of facts.
Nigel Melville, 58, the interim RFU chief executive and a former England captain, called it ‘‘a global problem’’. There were numerous suggestions and requests in the media conference that was called to discuss the report, for World Rugby, the global governing body, to lead the game to find a solution.
Yet it was more than a straight set of facts. Indeed, it felt as though the RFU was moving on to new ground.
The RFU has been the leader in a number of initiatives to make the game safer. Again, we could have talked about these, though they were only briefly touched upon. Instead, there came a very different message. Not: we think we’ve got it sorted. But: we need to think again.
Simon Kemp, the head medic in the RFU, could not have been clearer. He said that ‘‘significant changes to the game might be needed’’. He called upon the game’s administrators ‘‘to think innovatively about how the laws of the game can prioritise player safety’’.
In other words, he invited the game to find a new territory. At the moment, there is a study under way in the Championship Cup, a competition for the secondtier English clubs, about whether, if we lower the legal tackle height by about four inches, we can reduce the number of concussions.
By chipping away like this, we may gain some success, we may not. Kemp was suggesting that incremental gains may not now be enough. He was inviting the game to go further.
You can play this game at home, in the pub or in your rugby club. What may the game look like in five years’ time? How may it change to be better and safer?
The broader answer is that you would want more space on the field. I would start by bringing down the number of substitutions that can be made. I would also go straight to the interpretation of the laws at the breakdown: how can we get more bodies into the ruck and therefore create more space outside?
You may think that a weight limit per team could have a positive effect; it could depower a team, invite fewer blood-andthunder collisions and more stealth. Or you could just come to the same conclusions that another group of rugby fanatics made in England more than a century ago and decide to reduce the number of players on the field.
The message from the RFU was that the time has come for the professional game to begin to think like that. It is not only a game; it needs to happen. Significant changes. Innovation. Chipping away may not work.
World Rugby has long had a law review process in which it has gradually changed the game and nudged it in what it believes to be the best direction. The changes over recent years have tended to reflect the game’s need to market itself; the direction of change has been towards a sport that is easier to understand or that is more exciting to watch.
The message from PRISP and its partners was that the direction needs to change. The law review body needs some blue-sky thinking, with the sole intention being safety. With the publishing of the PRISP report and all its unfortunate injury statistics, it was a bad news day, essentially, for rugby. If the game can heed the message, though, it could turn out to be the very opposite.
‘‘Significant changes to the game might be needed.’’ Head RFU medic Simon Kemp