Is poor coaching to blame?
THERE have been more sad revelations of how Steve Thompson is suffering in his post playing life as a result of injuries he suffered while playing and training for the game.
Having a playing career that lasted around 13 years and suffering, he says, between 80,000 and 100,000 head knocks means if he played and trained for five days each week he suffered around 30 head collisions each day. With that sort of number of injuries surely there should be some questions asked of the coaches at club and international level who were in charge of the sessions?
Although being in the front row put him in a potentially dangerous place when the scrum is set, in my experience there were not that many head to head clashes. Unfortunately for Thompson he seems to have been the victim of poor coaching techniques as he also suffered what was a career ending neck injury in 2007 and left the game only to recover and restart his career in France, a country which has a pretty physical club scene.
They always say hindsight is 20/20 vision but I am sure that if Thompson could have seen the future he would have taken the doctor’s advice in 2007 and retired from the game, rather than continuing his playing for another four years potentially saving himself from approximately 33,200 head knocks over that period.
With that level of head knocks and no proper rest periods, it’s no wonder he now has a problem. I count myself lucky that after playing the adult club game for around 28 years and playing more games each week than Thompson (although I must admit to not training as much as him) plus also, I have taken part in the first round of testing for early onset dementia and thankfully, I was found to be clear.
As for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), I will never know, as it can only be diagnosed by a post-mortem dissection of the brain.