Loose Pass: The dangers of rugby

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with health and safety, as well as stints abroad following Ronan O’Gara’s exploits.

Pause for thought

There is no one worse time than another for something like it, but the dreadful news of the passing of Louis Fajfrowski will not do anything to ease the fears that rugby in France especially – but also in the UK – is simply set up to do damage to its protagonists.

The French rugby newspaper Midi-Olympique devoted the first five pages of last week’s edition to reaction and analysis of the retirement through repeated injury of Sam Warburton – before Fajfrowski’s accident. A one-page editorial listed in gruesome detail Warburton’s injuries, an interview with a couple of players revealed just how much time injured players often spend, and a scientific analysis of the forces at play in the modern game compared to years ago was terrifying, while a club doctor uttered the particularly pertinent – and memorable – phrase: “if you’ve set up a game where Michalak has to tackle Nadolo, you’ve got a health problem.”

Rugby is, unfortunately like much of the world, at a bit of a stressed tipping point. There are clearly too many games of ferocious physical intensity for the top-level players, but you can’t change it because nobody will budge. The clubs won’t agree to less game time as they’ve financial models to stick to. The unions won’t budge for similar reasons. The players are the ones with the power – they are the performers after all – but there’s little sign of them doing anything beyond resisting, albeit with significant strength, any other half-cut notion of extending the season further. They are also the ones suffering: interviews with injured players have for some time sounded more forlorn than they used to.

Yet it’s common knowledge that the injury rate is on a steep rise, just as it is common knowledge that as young aspiring pros get bigger and faster, the youth game is becoming just as littered with injury problems, both long and short term. More and more teams are bedeviled by injury crises, placing more and more inexperienced and potentially ill-prepared or equipped players in the firing line. Now a young player has died, while several top-line professionals are about to go under the knife before the northern season has even started. We can’t ignore it any more.

Two and a bit years ago, a number of doctors wrote to the government asking for a ban on tackling in rugby for youth players, warning of the dangers. It was never going to happen – you’re not going to get rid of a tackle in rugby – but it was an attempt at dialogue, at looking at some form of solution, some form of instigating common sense into the schedules and workloads of our elite athletes. While the letter was batted away with a fair amount of lip service, nothing has really happened. We’ve got slightly lower tackles now, but there’s no outlawing of putting the head on the wrong side, for example. And while it’s only a representative sample size, evidence is starting to mount that the new laws, designed to speed up the game and reduce the ruck time, have also upped the collision count and the number of dangerous injuries that causes.

One of the more interesting reads of recent times was Rob Andrew’s book ‘Rugby, the Game of My Life,’ in which he highlighted these problems too. It’s not just that there are more games, they are played by people about 25% heavier, faster and fitter than they used to be, and there are no more easy games either. Whatever else was said or not said in the book, the insight of someone whose career was spent balancing the tug-of-war between unions and clubs, with the players frequently a forgotten part of it all, was fascinating.

Near the end, Andrew made the very clear point, or warning, that the next round of squabbling may be instigated by players themselves, players who for far too long have been sacrificing a little too much to realise the dreams of their paymasters and owners, however well-intentioned they might have been. We’re starting to think that moment cannot be far away.

Not that Fajfrowski’s death is a direct result of this all, but it has to be added to the accumulated evidence that there is simply too much rugby of too much physical intensity with too little proactive thought going into how to manage this impact on the game’s most prized asset: the players.

You can’t prevent tragic accidents, but you can reduce the chances of them. It is becoming high time the game looks at itself in this way, before we end up with an NFL-type problem.

Foreign lessons

Another point made by Andrew – and yes, holiday reading has affected this column – was that while so many southern hemisphere coaches head north to finishing school, so few go the other way.

France has become a finishing school of sorts; there’s little doubt Stephen Jones came back from Clermont significantly improved as a player, likewise Jonny Wilkinson at Toulon. Coaches are also starting to find the learning experience of France an extra feather in the cap.

But Ronan O’Gara’s description of the Crusaders experience as ‘life-changing’ may hopefully alter that.

It’s no secret that when it comes to game-management and other such fineries, New Zealand in particular have long since been streets ahead of most, while Europeans still tend to go towards a safety-first, structured approach. It’s changing, but the pace of that change is slow indeed.

O’Gara’s stock price must have jumped immeasurably. Wherever he goes next, it will be fascinating to see if he can reproduce what he learned and instill it into his charges.

But the more coaches from the north who head south – and it doesn’t just have to be New Zealand – the better the game up here, and globally, will be.

Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan