To 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 out – have been almost as astonishing as this idea: that the treatment of a single collision in a sport that has hundreds of them in each match will make any difference to player welfare.
If player welfare includes respect for players, the concept flew out of the window as soon as the sport recommended red cards for split-second mistimings. If you punish unintentional acts with the ultimate sanction, all you guarantee is the ultimate sanction, again and again and again, rendering the entire notion meaningless – and betraying the punished for good measure.
Farrell has been issued with the ban so many wanted through the most embarrassingly tortuous process, which has further damaged the sport’s credibility, already in tatters from the endless stream of red cards. Now he is suspended, is rugby back on its path to the angels? Now that Billy Vunipola has also been banned for a similar split-second incident – which, like Farrell’s, happened so quickly it was missed by everyone in real time – is rugby “safe again”?
No need to answer that. These red cards, introduced nearly seven years ago on 3 January 2017, have had no effect on concussion incidence, no effect on injury rates, no effect other than to turn rugby into a laughing stock as high-profile game after game is corrupted by them.
Even if they did have any effect on those metrics, the real threat awaiting rugby is from the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in future life, which has nothing to do with one-off incidents, concussive or not.
In June, the latest research to emerge from the Boston University brain bank, by far the most extensive collection of confirmed cases of CTE in the world, demonstrated an even stronger correlation than previously suspected between risk of CTE and the cumulative force of multiple impacts suffered by an athlete over a career. Meanwhile, in January 2020, the tackle count in a rugby union match broke 500 for the first time.
This should set into some sort of context the madness of the past fortnight. None of it – the red cards, the bans, the senseless raging on social media – is going to make the slightest difference to any rugby player’s future health. Nor will the sorry fiasco of red cards for unintentional mishaps make any difference to the path rugby is hurtling along towards its own apocalypse, other than to propel it onwards even faster.
Certainly, if you accept the wisdom of these bans, it is difficult to see why Farrell was pardoned initially when so many others have not been. Add in his status as a trigger personality and you have your furore.
It is entirely of the authorities’ making. These scenarios are inevitable when the underlying premise of the policy is so flawed. There is mitigation for virtually every one of these incidents, namely that they occur in a sport that is faster and more explosive than it has ever been by untold multiples. This fact is seemingly lost on the administrators, many of whom played in an era that was slow, unscrutinised and genuinely violent and malicious.
Inevitable, too, are the red cards, which keep coming nearly seven years on. The Rugby World Cup is so exciting despite a draw that sees the world’s best teams in one half and Argentina in the other. But the only thing we can say of it with any confidence is that there will be red cards. We have had one in a World Cup final, in Auckland last year. If the men’s equivalent should see another, in front of an audience of millions, that tattered credibility will be shredded to oblivion.
Worse still is the futility of it all. Neurologists around the world have long maintained that CTE in sport is not caused by one-off events, such as result in a diagnosed concussion, but a long buildup of multiple rattlings of the brain, such as occur in any rugby collision, whether direct to the head or not.
Meanwhile, the findings from the instrumented mouthguards the Ospreys, Harlequins and Gloucester have used variously over the past few years indicate that 30% of impacts as registered at the skull in a typical first-class match are from direct impacts to the head. If people think the head collisions in the Farrell and Vunipola incidents were the only ones in those two matches, they are gravely mistaken.
As for the other 70% – the collisions that do not involve direct contact to the head – they account for more than half the cumulative forces transmitted to the skull. If a human body is moving at, say, 10mph one split-second, then 0mph the next, the jolt is transmitted throughout, including and especially to that gelatine organ floating in the cranium.
The idea that the future of player welfare may depend on the successful singling out and banning of participants in one-off incidents deemed unsavoury is self-evidently ludicrous, given the hundreds of other collisions in any one game. Once we factor in the rucks and scrums, that match between Leinster and Connacht in 2020 probably contained more than a thousand of them.
Yes, rugby is facing an apocalypse and may very well not exist in its current form in 50 years’ time. Yes, finding a neat fix to that is nearly impossible (one obvious mitigation, whisper it, would be to play fewer games). But that does not mean we should settle for any old change because it seems neat, especially when that change wreaks untold damage for no upside.
Just as when a person does not like the way they look, there may not be an easy solution. But punching themselves repeatedly in the face is surely not it. Every red card for an act of foul play that is not deliberate and the mad circuses that follow are a punch to the face of rugby. It’s difficult to know how much more the sport can take.
