The look on the face of A&E staff was one of horror and disbelief. ‘He’s playing contact rugby – at eight?’ I nodded, my son Gus’s left arm hanging uselessly by his side, his face white and pinched with pain.
Later, after we emerged from the X-ray and plaster rooms with a diagnosis of a micro-fracture to the elbow, one of the nurses from reception caught up with us. She was so concerned that she’d gone on to the RFU website, which confirmed that contact is indeed legal from Year 4. (Although the spear tackle that Gus’s friend had executed definitely isn’t.)
‘Striking a child outside of sport is abuse, but striking a child in sport is socially acceptable’
Our sons’ prep school, like many others, switches from tag to contact rugby at the start of Year 4. It wasn’t something we’d had a problem with: both boys love it (largely for the sanctioned violence and match teas) and aren’t shy about getting involved. My husband, who was a decent junior player, is also evangelical about the benefits.
But since nursing an eight-year-old with a complex fracture and his elder brother (then nine) through a concussion which was missed at the time and I only spotted the following day when he started staggering, unable to keep his eyes open, I’m rather less gung-ho. I’m no snowflake, having been blue-lighted to A&E several times after falls from horses at speed, but surely two serious injuries before the age of ten is a bit much?
Concern about rugby in schools is nothing new. During the golden age of public school rugby in the late 19th century, schools frequently changed the form of football they played, while the minutes of school governors’ meetings from the 1900s list concerns about safety.
More recently, a steadily growing body of peer-reviewed scientific research has highlighted the long-term risks of head injury on developing brains – notably Professor Allyson Pollock’s book, Tackling Rugby: What Every Parent Should Know About Injuries, which she began researching after her teenage son sustained three serious injuries on the pitch. This year however, the rhetoric has ratcheted up considerably. Playing rugby in schools was branded ‘a form of child abuse’ in an academic report published in February. Highlighting the cognitive harm caused by collisions, Eric Anderson, professor of sport at Winchester University, who led the study, declared: ‘Cultural perception is that striking a child outside of sport is abuse, but striking a child in sport is somehow socially acceptable.’
Then there’s the class action lawsuit over brain damage being brought against three of the sport’s governing bodies (the RFU, World Rugby and the Welsh Rugby Union) by more than 200 former professional and amateur players. The claimants include Phil Vickery, Gavin Henson and the World Cup winner Steve Thompson, who has early-onset dementia and says he cannot remember England’s 2003 World Cup win over Australia.
If the PR is bad, then the school statistics are even more dire for those who love the game. The number of children who play rugby in schools has reduced by 20 per cent in the past six years, according to Neil Rollings, a former director of sport at Sedbergh and Cheltenham College, who works with schools to develop sports programmes.
Rugby in schools ‘faces an existential threat’, he believes, with rising ‘parental concern’, while the game is struggling with ‘structural and reputational challenges’.
One head of governors at a prep school tells me: ‘There is tremendous parental concern. Whenever there’s a meeting and we get to the any other business bit at the end, it’s all people want to talk about. I don’t think rugby has more than ten years left in schools.’
It’s not only parents’ concerns about head injuries that have put school rugby in jeopardy. At senior school level, standards are increasingly polarised – the better players often train with elite academies, which leads to a greater imbalance of power on the pitch.
‘And of course, they’re all in the gym trying to get as big as possible,’ says one mother, whose son, George, had to give up rugby after three devastating concussions. ‘Certainly professional rugby players are much bigger than they used to be – and schools seem to be following that course,’ says Professor Mike Loosemore, a consultant in sports medicine with a special interest in adolescent concussion. ‘The collision forces are so much higher now because people are genuinely bigger. It’s possibly why there are more concussions. But we’re also a lot better at spotting it now.’
Most of the patients Loosemore sees in his private clinic are under 18 and suffering from rugby injuries. He admits to having a ‘jaundiced’ view of the sport from seeing some of the worst cases: teenagers who haven’t recovered from their concussions and are suffering tremendous headaches and fatigue, while their school performance has ‘fallen off a cliff’. He stresses that ‘you really don’t want to be getting concussion in your teens – you want to avoid it’, yet as a former enthusiastic player himself, Loosemore believes it would be ‘a great shame’ if rugby was to disappear from schools. ‘I think it’s a fantastic sport for young people.’
As we talk, a glaring conflict becomes evident between the inherent risks of rugby and the fun, adrenaline and camaraderie of the sport that he loved playing. My main take-home from our conversation is that ‘there is no such thing as a mild concussion – you’re either concussed or you’re not’ – and it takes ‘a month’, he emphasises, ‘to get over a concussion completely and get the biochemistry back to how it should be. If I were a parent, I’d have them off for a month.’
The RFU rule for returning to competition is about three weeks – that, according to Loosemore, ‘is about a week too short’. It’s important for the brain to recover properly – otherwise, with another knock, ‘you then start accumulating issues that you’ll take a lot longer to recover from’.
Rollings stresses that the game ‘has got to find ways of reducing contact and concussion’ and he wonders if it would be better to delay playing contact to the age of 11. He also cites the benefits of a third version, a sort of ‘rugby-lite’ between non-contact and what he calls ‘open warfare’, pioneered by London schools led by St Paul’s. The day it was trialled there were no injuries, he reports. It’s similar to the under-ten rules: uncontested scrums, one person in the clear-out, players can’t run hard directly at someone – and will be played at every age group.
Yet although fewer boys are playing rugby in schools, with fewer fixtures taking place than at any time in recent history, cheerleaders like Rollings believe the situation can be salvaged. ‘I was gloomy but I’m less gloomy now,’ he says. ‘People are working to make the game safer. The irony is that it’s probably never been a safer time to play. The toxic masculinity of “get up and get on with it” – that’s largely historic now.’
Contact rugby isn’t compulsory: England Rugby’s schools ‘playing offer’ lists non-contact, reduced contact – and full contact as the third option. Yet I was aggrieved to learn, when my son’s cast came off and I told the school he wasn’t to play rugby until he’d taken his music exams, that non-contact was still an option. (In reality, this meant that he just sat out games lessons for the rest of term.) Would we have taken that option, had it been presented to us at the start of Year 4? I doubt it. But after having spent six days in various hospitals with my primary-school-age sons, I do wonder about the wisdom of starting contact so young.
George, the teenager who suffered post-concussive syndrome, missing months of school and his GCSE mocks, talks wistfully about having to give up the game. ‘Even after three concussions, making the decision to quit was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘I loved every single minute of it. It’s a team sport that is so adrenaline-fuelled and addictive, there’s such camaraderie that your team is almost a family.’
Rollings takes heart from a survey of 160 prep schools he conducted last year, in which 60 per cent of rugby masters ‘agreed or strongly agreed that most boys are as enthusiastic about the game as ever’. Rugby’s great shortcoming, he believes, is failing to promote the benefits of the sport. ‘While credible scientists are gathering data as to why the game is dangerous, the game isn’t articulating what the game can do.’
I did put this point to the RFU, which eventually directed me to a lengthy stock response I’ve seen regurgitated elsewhere, about the health benefits ‘outweighing the risk of injury’ and ‘prioritising player welfare’ with initiatives such as smart mouth guards and lowering tackling height in the community game. Frankly, 16-year-old George expressed the virtues of the sport he can no longer play far more eloquently.
Yet there’s another piece of evidence in Rollings’s survey that suggests rugby won’t become another arcane affectation of public schools, destined to go the way of fagging and flogging. The one area where participation of all formats of rugby is up is in the girls’ game. Benenden, Sydenham High and Sherborne Girls’ are among those fielding female teams. Like football’s Lionesses, the Red Roses – England’s women’s team – enjoy rather more success on the international stage than their male counterparts. Perhaps we should be looking to them to stop rugby’s decline.
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