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There wouldn’t be too many rugby league fans left who decry the tighter controls in the game surrounding concussion.
We all have memories of players stumbling around in days of yore and of how this was seen as being courageous. We remember tweety birds giving jarred craniums a comical visage in cartoons.
But we are also painfully aware of the class action in the NFL, of suicides and of players like Liam Fulton, Brett Hodgson and Michael Monaghan whose decisions to retire have been influenced by getting too many knocks to the scone.
The only time we want to hear the expression “he’s in Disneyland” in rugby league from now on is when we’re looking at our heroes’ off-season Instagram posts.
But what we don’t seem to want to digest is the other half of this welfare contract: that if we are going to be harsh on victims by forcing them to stay off the field if they do not pass certain tests, then we must be harsher on offenders than we were in the past.
Doing one without the other is patently unjust as it creates an incentive to take players out of a game, capitalising on well-meaning medical guidelines.
I am not in any way suggesting that is what Widnes’ Patrick Ah Van intended to do this morning in the opening game of Super League, when he cracked Wigan’s Josh Charnley in the side of the head and was sent off. England winger Charnley was judged unable to return during the match.
Social media commenters were right in saying you cannot punish a crime according the injury sustained. But the results of a transgression can indicate whether the rules in place are just, and whether the correct action was taken at the time.
James Child did the right thing to send off Ah Van, in my view. It is the modern player’s duty to avoid contact with the head of an opponent. Ah Van made no attempt to do so.
In previous seasons, of course, Charnley would have returned – a winger feeling a bit dizzy has been par for the course in our game for 120 years.
And so it follows that in previous seasons Ah Van would have been penalised or – in those few years when the sin bin could be used for foul play – he would have copped a yellow card.
Yet most people thought Ah Van should not have been dismissed. None of them were calling for Charnley to “harden up” come back on with concussion, though.
But one follows the other. If we create a situation whereby a crime can have a much, much more serious impact on its victim than it had before, we must increase the penalty for that crime by a commensurate measure.
The question is not whether rugby league is getting soft. Of course it is. It has got progressively softer since 1895.
It’s important that the whole game gets soft at the same speed and that we don’t create loopholes by tidying up one area and forgetting another.