Buzzing to see Leicester Tigers win the Premiership final today.
Followed them for more than 20 years and got very used to days like this but the last couple years have been extremely poor and to nearly be relegated was quite the humbling place to be.
To come back from that place and be Champions two years later is an immense achievement. Some great stories in there today. Burns coming back to the club and dropping the winning goal. Genge leaving having lifted the trophy as captain. Tom Youngs being there with all heâs been through recently.
Came across this incredibly sad story which probably wonât ring very loudly anywhere other than in Wales. Even then I doubt it will register with people here.
Read the quotes please. They add real gravity to this.
I just read that the FA are now trialing a no heading rule in all football at U12 and younger. I dont know what impact will make, but itâs a start. Other than the moves Rugby has already taken to eliminate hits to the head, I just dont know what more can be done given the nature of the game. Rucking seems like a big aspect, but you take that away and itâs rugby league.
I am actually somewhat more optimistic about what the rules changes will do, but it is going to be slow. There is immense pushback right now, you can see it at all levels, and very frequently is regarding contact made entering the ruck. Seems to me that pushback is a positive sign though, players complaining that they cannot do what they always used to do are sort of missing the point.
Iâd argue that head contact in the tackle is an equally big issue. The techniques of staying low and âtacklingâ the ball have really created all the ingredients for collisions. I dont know what the answer to that is.
The size and pace of players now as well. The idea of the overweight prop is disappearing fast along with the introduction of what I call the Lomu affect where backs are getting far bigger and more powerful is now the norm. This is filtering down through the levels to where youâve got school kids on training regimes where they try to pack on as much mass and power as possible. Crap even I was guilty of it all those years ago.
The tackle is absolutely part of the problem, but I thought Limiescouse was alluding to was the increasing number of cards related to contact in the ruck, and the corresponding wave of controversy.
To put in the context of the Ireland-NZ series most of us would have seen, I think the Taâavao red card has to be a red, every single time. But the Porter-Retallick collision should be too. I can understand why it wasnât in real time, but âmitigationâ seems pretty thin in that case, even if Porter was honestly trying to pull out of the tackle - you simply cannot allow tackles that high. Tackles like Porterâs have to be punished ruthlessly to drive them out of the game. Mitigation simply should not apply. If that changes the game, so be it. Head impacts are otherwise going to destroy it.
What I meant is that reasonable measures have already been taken to reduce the risk where possible, but they still exist to some significant degree, primarily in the tackle and in the ruck. Even within the limits of what is now allowed the risks are real, but the tackle is so fundamental to rugby that short of drawing an even harder line with tackles, where even less leeway is given for mitigation of borderline cases, I dont see what more they can do there. That leaves the ruck as the primary target, but its hard to see how you can do any more there and keep the ruck as a competitive element of the game, and once that is gone the game is effectively 15 man league.
Keep in mind that what weâve learned from US football is that while the big collisions where someone leaves with their bell rung are what get the attention, it is the accumulation of much more minor contacts that seem to be the bigger problem. How stealthily these have their impact makes them that much harder to protect against, because what youâre talking if you want to address that is things like drastically altering youth competition with non-competitive scrums, and severely restricting rucking and scrummaging practice even into the first team level and I dont know how viable the game is in a situation where the core skills are not allowed to be practiced or developed.
I doubt scrums are a significant contributor to cumulative head injury, but rucks absolutely have been. There is definitely a tension there, the âgateâ idea for entering the ruck really limits the ability to make contact with an opponent while completely avoiding their head.
To some degree this is happening. Non contested scrums, touch rugby, etc etc. but something needs to change at the top to drive a revolution at the bottom. I honestly dont know what that is.
When I played, even training could get immensely physical and some would argue it needs to be just to work on certain aspects of the game. I found that thereâs also a toughening up period that we used to go through in preseason where your body would acclimatise to the impacts.
Asking players to be responsible in the tackle area or ruck doesnât quite hit home for me. In my mind it doesnât address the risk, it purely becomes a buck passing protocol.
What is taught to players has to change, which is where I am seeing the most resistance (rants about how there were no head injuries in the 70âs, etc). The calculus behind the best technique has to shift by making the risk of head contact not worth the sanction, so players simply learn different âbestâ methods. Inevitably, that is going to produce alterations in the balance and tactics of the games, and not necessarily obvious ones.
Anything that reduces the number of blows to the head, no matter how severe, is probably a good thing for young kids.
But I remember playing around that 10-12 age group and probably more than half of the kids that age couldnât get the ball off the floor, let alone at head height with any significant force. Itâs something, but Iâm not sure itâs really going to do much. Far better would be to play with a smaller ball that bounces less, like a Futsal ball, and restricting age groups to playing with those. Would be better for skill development and mean far less heading.
As for rugby, itâs a sport that is now built around collisions rather than the avoidance of them. Push the tacklers to go lower and you move the risk from the person being tackled to the tackler. Until the game changes significantly, weâre going to see bigger and bigger players colliding at faster and faster speeds and thatâs going to take a huge physical toll, even if all head contact was somehow removed with a magic wand.
