The dangers of new rugby
Professor John Fairclough of Cardiff Metropolitan University in the faculty of sport and exercise medicine is a consultant orthopaedic surgeon and was the president of the British Orthopaedic Sports and Trauma Association. He is finding modern rugby troubling.
In fact he says that the present mode of play fuelled by the Laws of the Game is turning rugby football into a 'game for freaks', for the collisions are taking such a toll of players with as yet unknown long-term effects.
In the middle weekend of the three in the Test window, Italy played against Fiji. It was an awful game on an awful field in Cremona. Six players were yellowcarded, four of them Fijians in eight minutes in the first half to reduce their team to 11 players. But the action that did the most damage received no sanction. early in the match, Asaeli Tikoirotuma of Fiji sailed into Luca Morisi, Italy's 22-year-old centre. He was hurt but played on for a short while before being removed. He was later operated on and his damaged spleen removed.
The match at Twickenham between England and New Zealand did not reach the bizarre level of the Cremona match, but was a harsh clash between two powerful relentless packs. In it the England hooker, Dylan Hartley, had to leave the field. He had a bruised lung.
Fairclough is quoted on the UK's The Rugby Paper as saying: "If this was boxing, we'd be starting to look at the rules. I am not an expert on rugby's rules but my view is that somehow or other the game has to acknowledge that the impact at ruck and maul must be reduced.
"It alarms me totally. This is not rollerball and yet we talk about 'breaking the line'. You can't go round people now. The game we see now is not the game as it used to be."
Fairclough said the area that really concerned him was the ruck. "You cannot just clear people out of the ruck, least of all when they're not looking. That means they're not braced for impact and that's where serious knee injuries occur. There are now so many big men laying behind the scrum that at the highest level it's become a game for those who are physically above and beyond the norm."
He said that the big increase in size of players in the last decade or so was at the root of the problems. "[It was] a sport for all shapes and sizes; then it became a sport for freaks. Look at people like Leigh Halfpenny and Shane Williams. They went from being very quick, very lithe and relatively light to having to bulk up. Look at the amount of injury that Leigh in particular has suffered.
"There is an inevitability that serious injuries will continue to rise. The human body is not meant to take that amount of force. What we're seeing here is the price of sport, not just in terms of what those in sport give up but what happens to their bodies because of it."
