The Wrap: Rugby enters 2022 confused, off kilter and at a major crossroads

The beginning of the new rugby season is invariably a time of optimism. A women’s World Cup looms. The Super Rugby clock is reset to zero. And even if the mood in Aberavon and Exeter this morning is bleak, fans still entered the weekend full of hope.

Similarly optimistic, club players put in the hard yards to work off the Christmas beers – effectively to make space for more ale to take its place when the lads come together to celebrate famous victories against traditional rivals.

Who doesn’t love a new rugby season?

But at the risk of being a party pooper so early in proceedings, rugby enters 2022 confused and off kilter. Think Cheslin Kolbe floundering about in Brodie Retallick’s boots, Trevor Nyakane’s shorts and Scott Fardy’s headgear.

Of course rugby remains worthy of celebration, but a curious irony shrouds the game. At no point in rugby’s history has awareness of the dangers and deleterious effects of concussion been higher, yet coinciding with this there is widespread confusion and misinformation, players who continue to suffer and a disturbing, overarching sense that rugby has pulled the handbrake on solving the issue.

Broken down, the challenge for rugby – and all contact sports – covers four distinct aspects: understanding and acceptance, prevention strategies, management of concussed players, and recognition and restitution for historic sufferers.

The latter issue will play out in the UK courts, with a prominent group of around 170 ex-players currently attached to a claim. But why should the matter of rugby looking after its own be left to courts to determine and direct? The establishment of a future fund from within the game – if needs be, safe from requiring any admission of liability – must surely be a priority.

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Individual management of concussed players is mostly earnest and visible yet contentious. Professional rugby still relies on a pitch-side test and a return to play protocol that measures symptoms rather than actual concussion markers. Players are known to game the system, and no matter what is said about club and country always placing the welfare of the player ahead of the occasion, slip-ups continue to occur.

Witness Luke Cowan-Dickie, who was visibly concussed in a club match last year before being allowed to fly to South Africa and play for the Lions the following week.

If I may be allowed a moment of levity on such a serious matter, some might say that Cowan-Dickie, thinking he was playing volleyball, not rugby, on the weekend, is still suffering.

Rugby has also become bogged down in arguments about minimum stand-down periods. English rugby league moving to a mandatory 11-day stand-down for concussed players has triggered claims that rugby, with what is seen as a minimum six-day stand-down, is dragging its feet.

UK-based lobby group Progressive Rugby, who do a terrific job raising awareness around concussion, expressed its frustration on this matter as well as the recent World Rugby ‘brain health initiative’, observing how an insistence on an evidence-based approach means World Rugby’s “ambition as player welfare champions is undeniably diluted”.

It is indeed possible for a professional rugby player to return to play within a week of suffering a concussion provided a graduated set of daily protocols are passed. The experience for the vast majority of players, however, is that the process takes longer; in the case of players in the English premiership in 2018, a study showed it took an average of 22 days.

Notably it is a requirement for amateur adult players to rest completely for one week before even starting the graduated return-to-play process, and junior players must rest completely for two weeks before starting the process.

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By contrast, while both the rugby league and AFL trumpet 11 and 12 days respectively as best practice, in reality exception clauses can be triggered and players re-assessed and passed fit to play in just one week.

While the headline optics are poor for rugby, this curious arms race, built on the assumption that longer automatically means safer, is a diversion. The scientific basis that supports 11 and 12-day protocols is effectively the same science that informed the Victorian government’s decision to bar children from using outdoor playgrounds during the pandemic. It doesn’t exist.

In fact peer-reviewed research from La Trobe University’s Associate Professor Alan Pearce indicates that, following a trauma such as a concussion event, the brain only returns to normal function after 28 to 30 days.

But it’s not as simple as changing protocols to ensure a minimum stand-down period of three to four weeks. This would trigger a raft of problems, including under-reporting and the masking of injury, as well logistical and financial hurdles around squad sizes having to be beefed up lest competitions grind to a halt due to teams having insufficient available players.

As crazy as this scenario sounds, these are exactly the kind of tough conversations the game needs to be having. If a solution to greater numbers of players sitting out with concussions for longer is to allow clubs more players, then the question being asked is the wrong one. Instead the focus must turn towards the type of game rugby needs to become so that its participants don’t suffer awful, debilitating afflictions like early-onset dementia and Alzheimer’s disease as early as in their 40s and 50s.

And what about the potential land mines that are being laid out of sight? Everyone can see vision of high contact in professional rugby, but the nature of sub-concussive hits means that players can accumulate brain damage throughout their whole playing career without suffering any single overt major trauma.

This is exactly what happened in the case of AFLW and US gridiron player Jacinda Barclay, who after her death at 29 years old was found post-mortem to exhibit significant degradation in her brain white matter at a level usually associated with people far older.

If rugby is having enough difficulty managing what it can already see, how does the sport even begin to adequately address things like this that are hidden from view?

One thing about concussion and its potentially stark outcomes for players is that any piecemeal or partial response is pointless. A future fund for affected players makes little sense if nothing is done to stem the flow of players needing to draw from it, for example.

It has been determined in the courts that World Rugby, by dint of its governance over rugby’s laws, is the responsible body. And while the buck indeed must stop somewhere, this is actually a problem for everyone involved in the sport to help solve.

Lawmaking, refereeing and appropriate judicial systems – all overseen by World Rugby and its member unions – are one thing. Contributions from groups like Progressive Rugby, Alix Popham’s Head for Change foundation and other concussion advocates is another. But the role of coaches, players, media and fans to understand and accept the need to take action and to embrace safety measures cannot be overstated.

On the one hand, patience is required to tip-toe through the minefield that is ensuring actions are appropriately evidence based. But it can’t be so slow that inertia sets in and we are always waiting for the next piece of research to confirm something we can already see in the interim, potentially exposing more players to health risks than is necessary.

For coaches, preventing concussion is a minefield of unintended consequences and winding back what they know and believe. Depower the battle for the advantage line? Insist that defenders don’t enter tackle zones upright and return to more passive leg tackles, where the defender’s head is placed to the side and behind of the ball carrier’s legs out of harm’s way?

Limit further the amount of contact training? Cap the amount of time players spend in the gym, turning their bodies into mini-Sherman tanks? Stop measuring the g-forces players hit with and encouraging them to achieve new personal bests?

“Sure”, says every coach, “But only if I can be certain that all other coaches do the same thing”.

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Among fans there seems to be an increasing willingness to accept the lowering of tackle heights and other safety measures but not to the point where matches increasingly grind to a halt. It was never meant for rugby fans to suffer through match officials convening mini-conferences, serving as police, judge and jury, deliberating over points of contact that are often impossible to determine accurately using the stadium hardware and vision provided them.

As a result, consistency from referees remains a sore point. Players are sent off when they shouldn’t be (Marika Koroibete against France), while others are not sent off when they should be (Ulster’s Craig Gilroy for a dangerous shoulder tackle on Scarlet’s Tom Rogers last week. Gilroy has since received a four-week suspension).

On this occasion referee Jaco Peyper ventured down the slippery slope of applying ‘mitigation’ for Rogers’s diminishing body height, seemingly ignoring the matter of Gilroy having ample opportunity to avoid slamming his shoulder into Rogers’s head regardless.

Because of the random nature of rugby, with each situation being unique, and the subjective nature of officiating – the law book and guidelines are open to interpretation by referees – absolute consistency will always remain elusive and, frankly, unattainable.

Perhaps it is an acceptable compromise to get most of the decisions right and, because player safety is paramount, ensure that when mistakes are made they err on the side of caution – that is, what happened to Koroibete as opposed to what didn’t happen to Gilroy.

To this end it has become apparent the 20-minute red card is a useful trade-off, a tool to radically change player behaviour while not totally killing off a side’s chances should they suffer from officials wrongly sending a player off.

The counter-risk – players who commit egregious acts of foul play costing their team a player for only 20 minutes instead of the whole match – is a concern, but perhaps more in theory only. Modern rugby is seldom ‘dirty’ – certainly not by the standards of the 1950s, 60s and 70s – and the discourse needs to shift from perceived and potential wrongs about fairness and relativity, in the very few cases where concussion events are caused by foul play, to solving the wider issue. How can rugby be made safer without it losing its essence?

To reform rugby from a collision sport back to a contact sport is exceedingly difficult. The nature of the game and the physiques of modern players sees to that, as does World Rugby’s unfortunate track record of being unable to corral all of the game’s stakeholders and drive necessary change. Global season, anyone?

Sure, there are little wins along the way – the recently announced hooker ‘brake foot scrum law’ already feels like a potential boon for scrum stability and safety – but for a sport bogged down by unwieldy governance and self-interest, something as big as reforming the way rugby is played in order to stave off an existential threat feels like too big of an ask right now.

That’s why we get more humming and hawing, more commissioning of and waiting for research, more talk-fests and wishy-washy ‘concussion statements’. It’s devilishly difficult to be decisive.

Right now rugby is without some of the world’s leading players – Eben Etzebeth, Beauden Barrett and Sam Underhill are all taking extended breaks because of the effects of multiple concussions. All Blacks skipper Sam Cane lives on the precipice, in all likelihood one more knock away from enforced retirement.

Last week while strolling around a Melbourne Rebels preseason training session I inquired about why Campbell Magnay wasn’t running around in the centres. “Taking a year off to try to fully recover from concussion symptoms,” was the answer from coach Kevin Foote, who last year never once saw his captain, Dane Haylett-Petty, take the field for the very same reason.

If there is no circuit-breaker, more players will be added to that list. While it is wrong to say that World Rugby is doing nothing, the big wheel is grinding far too slowly.

Concussion is a scourge that rugby didn’t ask for. But it is clear that the problem isn’t going away by itself, nor is continuing to massage at the edges going to be enough to shift the dial or keep parents invested in letting their sons and daughters take up the sport.

If rugby recedes because administrators weren’t proactive enough to solve the concussion problem, that would be a terrible indictment. Who in rugby is brave and powerful enough to lead the reform?