We know from American football that a storm is heading rugby’s way. The governing bodies must act now As the arguments rage about how best to recognise and treat brain injuries in rugby, clouds are gathering in the distance. There was fury during the summer tours when Johnny Sexton was picked for Ireland’s second Test against the All Blacks, a week after he had been withdrawn with such an injury in the first match. Meanwhile, England adopted a more conservative approach, withdrawing Tom Curry, Sam Underhill and Maro Itoje from their tour of Australia. Still those clouds gather. The appropriate treatment in the here and now of players with manifest brain injuries is non-negotiable, but it does not begin to...
Trescothick threw light on to the mental health problems in cricket, and we need better understanding more than everTime flies. It’s been 15 years since Marcus Trescothick last played for England, in a warmup match against New South Wales in November 2006. He broke down in the dressing room on the last day of the game – “All the same feelings of irrational fear, despair and panic came back in wave after bloody great wave” – and flew back to England that same evening. The team management described it as a “recurrence of a stress-related illness”. There were a lot of accusations, jokes and innuendoes, which were only put straight when Trescothick published his autobiography in 2008, and people at...
New research points to small, repetitive blows damaging rugby players’ brains, but boxing established this decades agoThey hanged Del Fontaine at Wandsworth prison early on Tuesday 29 October 1935, three months and 19 days after he shot his girlfriend Hilda Meek having overheard her arranging a date on the phone and convinced himself she was seeing another man. Protesters picketed the prison the day they killed him, one told the papers that “they’re hanging an insane man”. Fontaine was a boxer, and had been a good one, twice the middleweight champion of Canada, but that was behind him. He had lost 11 fights in the last year, in the last he was knocked down four times in the first round.When...
New research points to small, repetitive blows damaging rugby players’ brains, but boxing established this decades agoThey hanged Del Fontaine at Wandsworth prison early on Tuesday 29 October 1935, three months and 19 days after he shot his girlfriend Hilda Meek having overheard her arranging a date on the phone and convinced himself she was seeing another man. Protesters picketed the prison the day they killed him, one told the papers that “they’re hanging an insane man”. Fontaine was a boxer, and had been a good one, twice the middleweight champion of Canada, but that was behind him. He had lost 11 fights in the last year, in the last he was knocked down four times in the first round.When...
All the time that I have been investigating former players in middle age facing up to life-changing diagnoses, I have been watching the effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s on my wifeIt has been a horrible week for rugby, a fitting end to a year more harrowing and transformational for the sport than quite possibly any – 1995 and 1895 can make way now for 2020. From the salary-cap debacle at the start, through the ravages of a global virus, the more familiar ravages of an audience endlessly critical of the product, to this, an association with dementia in former players barely at middle age – what chance our grand old game surviving?From a personal point of view, it has been an...