You can't legislate against one-off twists of fate

And so there we all were, fussing and fretting about the likelihood of rugby league players in their fifties and sixties suffering long-term damage from head knocks when a 22-year-old’s head hit the turf.

Suddenly long-term damage seemed, well, a long way off.

As I write, the prognosis on Newcastle forward Alex McKinnon is still very uncertain. Like everyone in the rugby league fraternity, I can only wish him and his family strength and positive thoughts.

We should also be grateful he is in a position to be afforded the best possible care and support.

But I also feel sympathy for the alleged villain of the piece, Jordan McLean.

If, like me, you’ve watched rugby league for any reasonable length of time, you would’ve been through dozens, if not hundreds, of those moments where you see a player lifted, tipped and driven ferociously head-first into the ground.

You curse the recklessness, aggression or unnecessarily physical approach of the defenders, and you hold your breath. Then you marvel at the fact the tackled player bounces to his feet and carries on unscathed.

Alex McKinnon did not bounce miraculously to his feet on Monday night. But neither had I experienced any of those heart-in-mouth reactions when I saw him tackled.

Sure, I was concerned about the way he tucked his chin into his chest before he hit the ground and disturbed by the awkward way his neck was bent as he made contact with the playing surface.

But not for a moment did I think the tacklers overly-violent, or even reckless, in the way they’d dealt with him.

On a scale of one to 10 in dangerous tackle ratings I would’ve had it at about a two or three.

Yes, McLean came in as third man, grabbed one leg at thigh level, lifted and seemingly tipped McKinnon over the vertical. That probably puts him in breach of the rules and it perhaps means he contributed to the horrible outcome. While there is no doubt he should be held accountable for his actions, that does not equal being responsible for the result.

For starters, we still don’t know what the ultimate result will be. Neither do medical authorities.

Kudos to the NRL for the decision to let McKinnon and those close to him deal with the immediate challenge of the injury before trawling through the details of exactly what happened, and why.

Already we’re seeing calls for the gang tackle to be banned. Maybe that’s a solution but, to my way of thinking, less players in any given tackle means more players set in the defensive line, forcing ball runners to increasingly play the role of battering ram.

Roy Masters in Fairfax media has suggested it was the effort to prevent knee and lower leg injuries from cannonball tackles that influenced McLean to go thigh-high as the third man in.

The NRL had deemed it too dangerous to allow a man being held up by two defenders to be hit below the knee by a third defender and so tweaked the rule this season.

Maybe that’s the case. Roy’s a former top-level coach and I’m not, so it’s worthless me declaring him wrong or right. Nevertheless, the point he makes that seems most credible to me is that the object of the exercise was to slow down the play-the-ball, not to physically punish McKinnon.

And that would explain the lack of aggression or vigor in the incident that seemed so obvious at the time.

Masters argues the Storm defence were trying to put the ball-carrier on his back, not on his head. They wanted to prevent him from playing the ball quickly. The Storm have been masters of making the play-the-ball a three-act play and they’re also savvy enough to have recalibrated their approach given the change to the rules regarding the third man in.

So we have to address the harsh reality that trying to eliminate one undesirable outcome can open the door to the possibility of a different, yet equally undesirable, outcome. Or maybe an even more undesirable outcome.

At which point I can imagine some of the pro-shoulder charge lobby are getting ready to argue that the elimination their pet spectacular defensive play falls into the same category.

Not so.

The shoulder charge is by general definition a low percentage defensive tactic. It’s intended as a physically intimidating play. Furthermore, the effect of one shoulder charge, even one that goes astray and hits the head of the ball carrier, isn’t the major issue. It’s the cumulative effect across a career span of brain-jarring hits that’s cause for concern.

In the sad case of Alex McKinnon, one tackle gone wrong has caused what his club describes as a “devastating spinal injury”. It’s heartbreaking. But freak accidents happen and no amount of amending the rules will avert them.

You can’t legislate against one-off twists of fate. Sport – and life – are full of them.

When I was a young girl, Balmain centre Dennis Bendall suffered a serious head injury while on a school camp. He swung off a rope and into a pool in the Blue Mountains, hitting his head on a rock.

He diced with serious injury every week of the first grade football season in the brutal late-70s version of our game, but came to grief in what seemed like an innocuous recreational activity.

Michael Schumacher survived a career of Formula One racing, starting with a championship win the same year Ayrton Senna died in a race accident. Over the ensuing 20 years, rules were reviewed, tightened, amended and Schumacher himself taken to task for being too ruthless on the track.

Who could predict that having survived all of that he would end up on death’s doorstep (where he remains) as a result of a holiday skiing accident?

If there are no risks at all in sport, there’s precious little courage required. And courage is one of the purest and most admirable traits of sporting champions.

But if a specific demonstrated risk, especially one that builds up over a course of time, can be minimised and sports administrators choose not to minimise it – well that’s a different kettle of fish altogether.

Debbie Spillane joins The Roar today as a regular columnist. She is a trailblazer in Australian sports journalism: the first full-time female broadcaster hired by ABC Sport, and the first woman to call cricket on ABC radio, among other achievements. She hosts Grandstand’s NRL show The Hit Up, all-female sports talk program Hens FC, and calls Wanderers games in the A-League.