Johnny Nic on rugby: Bigger is not always better

Editor

In 4th and 5th year of school, I played on the right wing for the rugby team because me and Philip Steadman on the left were the fastest runners.

Both of us were as skinny as water but give us half a yard and no-one could catch us.

As a result, pretty much the only tactic we had was to get the ball to me and Phil as quick as possible. And it worked well. We won a lot of games that way.

When I moved up to 6th form, I reported for the first day’s rugby training thinking that I’d still be the fastest runner and that the winger gig was mine.

That was until I was tackled for the first time, slammed to the ground and rendered semi-conscious.

The lad that had tackled me was huge and apparently made of steel. He was nearly two years older than me and had long since left boyishness behind. This was A Man.

Back in the late 70s, being knocked out was no impediment to carrying on. Concussion was for wimps. If you could stand up, you were expected to play on. So I did.

But this was different rugby now.

I got slammed time and again. At the end of the session I already knew I was done with playing the game. I knew I’d be hurt and probably put into hospital unless I bulked up and put a lot of muscle on. I was now playing with the big boys and as a 5’ 10” 28” waisted whippet, just couldn’t physically compete.

Even so, back then, professional international rugby players were an entirely different physical specimen to today’s muscle-bound monsters.

Perhaps more than any other sport, the physical transformation of the players in the last 15 or 20 years has been extraordinary, as rugby conducted a kind of muscular arms race, getting ever bigger and more powerful in order to be able to just compete.

When you’ve the likes of Mathieu Bastareaud of France, or Wales’ Tomas Francis weighing in at over 20 stone running at pace, unless you can match them for power, you’re going to get steamrollered.

Try tackling Ben Tameifuna and you might as well jump in front of a speeding truck.

Players seem to have got bigger and bigger and with it injuries have got more and more prevalent. It’s not hard to see why.

Earlier this season, there were some global rule changes and as a result of them, an RFU report found an increase in the average number of tackles “involvements” and rucks per match, as well as ball-in-play time, in the first five weeks of the season. The number of collisions per match was also up.

World Rugby said it is too early to draw a link between the spate of injuries sustained and the new global law changes, but frankly if there are more tackles and more collisions, there is obviously going to be more injuries.

When you’ve got huge men battering into each other, what other result could there be?

In 2015 the National Institute of Sports and Physical Education in France found that the average weight of a 1987 World Cup forward was 104.2kg, the average back was 83kg.

By contrast in 2015, the backs weighed in at a 91.5kg average, marking a 6kg increase in size, and the average forward now weighed 111.3kg – an increase of more than 7kg over the past three decades.

The average World Cup player is almost a stone heavier than they were 30 years ago.

But weight per se still doesn’t tell the whole story.

This isn’t beery front-rows any more, these are nearer to body builders. The muscle mass of players is phenomenal and the ability to run faster and thus inflict more damage in doing so, is at an all-time high.

We’ve arrived at a strange state of affairs where you have to be physically huge and heavy to compete at all, but being massive means you’re more likely to get hurt and ironically not be able to compete for weeks at a time while you recover.

Surely there has to be an upper limit beyond which getting ever more huge and heavy is simply not allowed for the safety of all concerned. Indeed, we may have already surpassed it by some way.

The governing bodies also need to consider how disenfranchising they’re making the game for more ‘normal’ sized men. A lot of talented players may be put off playing the game as soon as they see the size of the opponents. In fact, you’d be a fool not to, in some ways.

There’s also one other important thing to consider about the nature of the game itself. While we all love to see a big lad ploughing through the opposition with bodies hanging off him, rugby is every bit as much a game of evasion as it is of collision.

Fleet-footed, slippery will-o-the-wisp wingers, like I once was, have effectively been outlawed; that side of the game has largely been sacrificed to power and I don’t think anyone really wants to see that. We all want free-flowing, dynamic rugby, surely.

Our lesson for the future is this: bigger isn’t better, bigger is just bigger: a lot bigger.

by John Nicholson