Let’s clean up the clean-out
Time to shine some light on the dark places of rugby’s breakdown after a drop in concussion at World Cup
World Rugby’s determination to lessen the risk of head injuries by lowering the tackle height seems to have worked. Concussions are down and the game is better. Hopefully there are fewer barriers to children playing (or their mums and dads allowing them to play).
Now for one more step, one that, thankfully, World Rugby are looking at and one which New Zealand Rugby is pushing hard via All Blacks coach Ian Foster — the “clean-out”.
It can manifest itself as a 120kgplus battering ram bearing down on an unprotected and unsuspecting player attempting to win the ball at a tackle. It is one of the most dangerous areas of rugby which has yet to be fully addressed; a last nettle yet to be grasped. The sooner it is fixed the better because it goes against what the game stands for (and let’s leave the driving maul, where players are effectively used as shields, for another day).
Yes, rugby can be a difficult game to follow, but strip it back to its simplest and it goes something like this: You can only be tackled if you have the ball. Except, that doesn’t quite apply these days, does it?
The battle for possession at the breakdown — a key area of the game which separates rugby from league — has turned the post-contact area into a dangerous place to be, a place where you can be hit hard when you don’t have the ball and can’t see what’s coming.
Not for nothing are top players praised for putting their heads in “dark places”, and few are braver than All Black Sam Cane, a man who broke his neck in 2018 after a ruck clean-out went wrong in a test against South Africa.
Actually, it was a little more than that — he broke his vertebrae in two places and there was a dislocation.
The break was fixed by a steel plate and four screws, with the dislocated vertebrae pushed back “like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle”, he told me at the Rugby World Cup in Japan last year.
Winning the ball in the tackle is a skill which, incidentally, the extremely resilient Cane is very good at, as is his Chiefs teammate Lachlan Boshier.
So, to hear New Zealand referees’ boss Bryce Lawrence tell Radio Sport’s Jim Kayes in an interview recently that the clean-out was addressed at a World Rugby conference in Paris and that changes are possibly imminent is heartening to say the least.
At last year’s Rugby World Cup there was a 28 per cent reduction in concussion and a 37 per cent drop in tackle concussions at the tournament compared with the average figures from elite events two years ago. That was down to the new tackle height ruling.
There were far more cards — yellow and red — but that is a small price to pay for improved safety.
A community trial in France and Fiji found that once the tackle height was moved to below the waist there was a threefold reduction in injuries, a 60 per cent decrease in head impacts, a 31 per cent increase in line breaks, a 67 per cent decrease in kicks and a significant reduction in winning margins.
That appears to be a win-win scenario.
“I’m like you, I think it’s extremely dangerous,” Lawrence told Kayes. “I’ve seen some brief notes from that meeting and I’m optimistic we’re going to see some of these things change.
“I’d say by the end of the month we should be able to give some really good feedback on some changes that New Zealand has been very influential on driving through Ian Foster in Paris this week.”