It is time to tackle the danger of school rugby

“To me that is far more important than the occasional niggle and scrape. I am

passionate in believing that we have a nanny state that continually tells me

what I can and cannot do.”

Greenwood was, rather aptly, taking a break from filming Sky’s School of Hard

Knocks to react to Pollock’s assertions that the monitoring of injuries in

junior rugby was “appalling”. As he put it: “Life is about taking knocks,

getting back off the floor, and going again. Are you telling me you want

rugby banned? I have never heard such nonsense in my entire life.”

The flaw in this argument is that rugby is not, and never has been, normal

life. Tearing one’s liver, as Mike Tindall once did, or covering one’s face

in cellophane to ward off scrum pox – yes, Phil Vickery has been there – are

not pitfalls any of us can reasonably expect to encounter as part of our

quotidian rituals.

Pollock’s thesis that rugby is becoming a byword for brutality is borne out by

the fact that its injury rates are almost three times as high as those in

football. More than 50 per cent of those injuries occur in the tackle, a

reflection both of the players’ increased bulk and a crude NFL-like

fetishisation of ‘the hit’.

Increasingly, the hardest impacts are akin to being struck by a train, and it

is these shuddering collisions that the Pollock camp would like to see

outlawed at junior level. Not all children, we might like to remember, are

as indurated as the Tuilagi brothers, who would kill time in the Samoan

fishing village of Fogapoa by hurling one another on to concrete paving

slabs.

To want to protect one’s progeny from such treatment is hardly mollycoddling.

In rugby, as in any other activity to which children are exposed, there

needs to be an implicit duty of care – and a recognition that they could

carry the effects of any serious injuries for their whole lives.

Trouble is, anyone attempting to explain this to the “mud-spattered

barbarians”, as Stephen Fry called them, risks being branded a Milquetoast.

Several of rugby’s more bovine apologists have even declared that Pollock

should be sacked from her position at Queen Mary, University of London, just

for venturing her perfectly valid view.

The polarisation of the debate underlines the philosophy of Jean-Pierre Rives,

the flanker who epitomised France’s guts-and-glory style in the late

Seventies and observed that the “point of rugby is that it is, first and

foremost, a state of mind, a spirit. Pierre Berbizier, his contemporary, was

even blunter. “If you can’t take a punch,” he scoffed, “you should play

table tennis.”

Leaving aside all the Gallic machisme for a second, let us examine the cold

realities. The situation in the junior ranks is already serious enough for

one in seven parents to admit that they would consider taking their children

out of rugby sessions.

Pollock’s research finds that a young person committing to a full season of

rugby carries roughly a 20 per cent chance of sustaining an injury,

typically a concussion or a fracture.

It is a startling ratio and one that, in the wake of the tragic death of

Northern Irish schoolboy Ben Robinson due to a succession of blows to the

head on the field, we ought to feel compelled to contemplate.

The concussion controversy so prevalent in the professional game has scarcely

begun to be extended to schools and when Pollock, with three decades of

experience in public health, is moved to speak we should be mature enough to

hear her out.

It is time to tackle the danger of school rugby