Eddie Jones’s sorrows as England’s rugby coach certainly keep coming in big battalions. Now the giant battered No 8 Billy Vunipola is out of the autumn internationals, and maybe longer. His brother Mako is hurt too, along with Sam Simmonds, Jamie George, former skipper Chris Robshaw, Joe Marler (retired) as well as Uncle Tom Cobley, the noted back row forager. They won’t go away, though, these injuries.
How do you get people to want to excel at a game not where you ‘might’ get injured but ‘will’ get injured, probably badly? Rugby at school level is an excellent game. The best players representing lst XVs in the Schools Cup are likely to turn pro and earn a good living. The game they currently play is contested by physical specimens you or I would recognise, the likes of which played top-level rugby a few decades back — men like Mike Slemen, David Duckham, JPR, Jean-Pierre Rives, etc. And no one will get punched or stamped or gouged, because these activities have pretty much disappeared from all levels of the game. Anyway, now you can hurt people without them.
The pro game is played by behemoths who can spend all week in the gym and have their diets monitored and their supplements graded and tailored to their needs. They are bigger, stronger, faster than ever before. They have more time to train and improve, and the best are expected to play 35 to 40 high-intensity, high- impact and, yes, downright dangerous games a year. The best NFL players play no more than 20 games. I love the game, but rugby can’t survive like this. Can it? Pundits relish the ‘hits’, the ‘smashes’, the tackles that ‘body bag’ an opponent: think of the ground-shuddering collision when Jerome Kaino stopped Jamie Roberts in Toulouse’s tight win over Bath.
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