>> Lipman: His diary of rugby concussions
By his own admission, Michael Lipman estimates to have been knocked out 30 times over the course of a 13-year professional career. During his last season in the Premiership, the former England flanker suffered five bouts of concussion.
The traumatic events of his final months at Bath paint a disturbing picture of a club captain considered by some as too brave for his own good.
January 25, 2009 at The Rec, Heineken Cup pool stage: Bath v Toulouse.
Seventeen minutes into the match, on a pitch reduced to a paddy field by hailstorms and teeming rain, Lipman takes the ball into contact and knocks himself out, the victim of an accidental clash of heads with a teammate.
The game is delayed for fully ten minutes. It takes the medics the best part of five minutes to bring Lipman round and another five of painstaking care to remove him from the pitch.
The blow leaves the Test openside no option but to withdraw from England’s Six Nations training camp on the Algarve the following week. He doesn’t know it yet but the blow will wipe him out of the entire tournament.
February 21, 2009 at The Rec, Premiership: Bath v London Irish.
Lipman is due to resume normal service in the back row. He has passed the cognitive test prescribed by the game’s governing body, The International Board, but, feeling less than 100 per cent, decides to subject himself to a physical test.
He asks Peter Short, Bath’s second row, to provide it. “I had him running to me and hitting me with a few tackle bags,’’ Lipman told me at the time. “I knew I wasn’t right. It’s hard to describe how I felt. Disorientated probably sums it up best.
“I cannot take any risk playing until I know I am right, not when the risks are of brain damage, memory loss, the shakes and all those sorts of things. I am very, very concerned.”
The blow against Toulouse has struck him behind the right ear. “I got hit on the same spot during a preseason match against Edinburgh and I’ve had a few more since then. It’s been a month now and I still can’t say how much longer it’s going to take.”
Lipman withdraws from the match, a 20-20 draw. He is to see a neurosurgeon the next day.
April 1, 2009 at The Rec, Premiership: Bath v Wasps.
After two come-back matches without mishap and Bath going flat out towards the Premiership Grand Final, Lipman takes another blow. It is serious enough to cause a ten-minute stoppage before medics take him from the field in a neck brace.
“Michael is a brave player,’’ head coach Steve Meehan says after the match. “Brave players put their team first. They get into positions where the opposition has to work hard to remove them. Maybe he would agree that he’s too brave for his own good but that is his character and you don’t change it.”
Lipman told the Sydney Morning Herald last Monday: “If I knew then what I know now, in terms of how I am feeling and what my wife and family go through on a daily basis, I definitely
“As a player you’re always going to say ‘I’m fine, I’m fine’ to get back onto the field”
would have been a hell of a lot more careful. I wouldn’t have changed the way I played but I certainly would have taken a lot more precautions.
“As a player you’re not always thinking straight. You’re always going to say: ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ I used to do it. You say whatever you need to say to get back onto the field and help your friends.”
According to some reports, Bath advised Lipman to retire. If that was the case, it was not, to the best of my knowledge, stated officially or unofficially.
They did go their separate ways at the end of that season, a parting which had nothing to do with his recurring
concussion. Lipman resigned along with two other players amid allegations of refusing to take a drugs test following an end-of-season party.
The game at large will be asking itself some serious questions.
Why has one international player ended up with brain damage and the onset of dementia at the age of 40?
Why a second, Welshman Alix Popham, at 41?
Why a third, England World Cup winner Steve Thompson, at 42?
Surely they would have seen this coming since 2009 at the very latest.
Lipman’s batterings then coincided with the first reported case of a Premiership flanker being forced into early retirement because of concussion.
Ben Herring, knocked out four times during his last season at Leicester, quit when a neurosurgeon told him: “We can’t replace your brain.”
The Establishment’s reaction was alarming at the time, even more so now as viewed through the prism of current events.
When busybody reporters raised the question, the RFU, among others, closed ranks and denied that concussion was becoming an issue.
That was eleven years ago. Has it really taken that long for the game to recognise the terrifying long-term price to be paid for the sheer intensity of its physicality?
When it comes to those whose lives are being afflicted by brain damage, the casualty list will extend far beyond Michael Lipman, Alix Popham and Steve Thompson.