None of the red cards, suspensions or social media raging is going to make any difference to a player’s future healthTo go by some of the more hysterical pronouncements during the Owen Farrell affair this past fortnight, the very concept of player welfare has been on the line. Ban him after his red card for a reckless tackle, so the argument goes, and rugby union has a future; let him off, and we will unleash a generation of delinquent psychopaths high-tackling each other into early graves.The ugliest side of rugby in the age of social media has been laid bare once again. The personal attacks on Farrell – and on his father when he had the temerity to call them...
Worrying cases of Denis Zakaria, Neco Williams and Alireza Beiranvand illustrate the dangers of football’s current protocolsWhile he was critical of his own Premier League debut in the wake of Chelsea’s win against Bournemouth last Tuesday, the general consensus in post-match musings across the media were that Denis Zakaria had acquitted himself well. More than a little alarming was the fact that few, if any, of those assessing the Switzerland international’s performance at Stamford Bridge seemed to notice that he should almost certainly have been withdrawn from the field of play when the game was only 20 minutes old.Helping the hosts defend a corner, Zakaria tracked a run from Kieffer Moore across Chelsea’s penalty area and appeared to whack his...
Paul Pook, one of the 225 former players involved in the legal case against the game’s authorities, on the diagnosis that has changed his life“We hear the term ‘functioning alcoholic’,” Paul Pook says, “well, sometimes I think of myself as a functioning suicidalist.” He apologises for the comparison, says he isn’t sure whether it’s inappropriate, only he can’t think of a better way of explaining it. Pook has spent the past 20 years working as a high‑performance coach, for the Irish rugby union team, the Russian Olympic Committee and the Australian Institute of Sport. He has helped athletes to win grand slams and gold medals. And all the time, he had these thoughts. The doctors call it “suicidal ideation”.Pook describes...
The latest conference, dominated by sceptics of recent research, will do nothing to bring clarity to the CTE debateAnother week, another conference. This one was organised by World Rugby and, like the last, which was organised by the Concussion in Sport Group, it was held in Amsterdam. World Rugby’s chief medical officer, Dr Éanna Falvey, explained that the aim was “to evaluate the latest research and focus on where we might need to focus funding to continue to fill the gaps in our collective knowledge”. There was a lot on the agenda: a session on instrumented mouth guards, a workshop on laws and player welfare, and, first thing in the morning, a series of talks on brain health and chronic...
Dr Paul McCrory’s work shaped concussion policy across global sport for the past 20 years – but organisations have been misledThe words land with a slap. “There is no scientific evidence that sustaining several concussions over a sporting career will necessarily result in permanent damage.” They are from a December 2001 editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, called “When to retire after concussion?”It goes on to say that it is “neuromythology” that a player ought to retire after suffering multiple brain injuries. “The unstated fear behind this approach is that an athlete suffering repeated concussions will suffer a gradual cognitive decline similar to the so called punch-drunk syndrome or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy seen in boxers. Based on published...