Law goes after head hunters

13 February 2017 - 10:16 By Prof Ross Tucker
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now
Clubs wishing to play in the Premiership must fulfil a list of criteria.
Clubs wishing to play in the Premiership must fulfil a list of criteria.
Image: Gallo Images/Thinkstock

On January 3 this year, World Rugby announced a "zero-tolerance" change to the high tackle laws in an effort to reduce the risk of head injury in the game.

The changes make the minimum sanction for a high tackle, even if it is accidental, a penalty. Yellow and red cards will penalise any tackle deemed to be reckless or deliberate, or involving high force contact to a player's head.

This change went by relatively unnoticed here in South Africa because the absence of rugby means that it hasn't directly had an impact on a match . yet.

The start of Super rugby in two weeks' time will thrust the law change into the conversation because it is bound to affect matches and create similar debate to that seen in the north.

I wanted to clarify some of the key points related to the law change - I was involved in the research that informed these changes, and the process should help to understand World Rugby's intention.

In the absence of some change in behaviour, you'd expect to see more yellow and red cards, and an increase in penalties, which is why fans are bound to get irate.

However, it is true that World Rugby's number one priority is player welfare and so this step is necessary in the drive to make the game safer.

How did this change come about? About a year ago, World Rugby embarked on a research study to understand how head injuries occurred in the game.

This is really important because any strategy will be effective only if it is accurately targeted. You can't go in guessing blindly. What we did was to analyse 611 head injuries in professional rugby over the past three years.

We looked at things like the type of tackle, the direction and speed of the players, their body position, and where the head contact occurred. These were compared with 3160 tackles that didn't cause an injury, which enabled us to work out how likely any possible scenario was to cause an injury.

The end result of this is what you can think of as a risk spectrum. Imagine drawing a line from left to right across this page of the paper.

On the left, put down all the "low risk situations", things like slow speed tackles, tackles where players are bent at the waist, tackles from the side, passive shoulder and smother tackles.

On the right side are the "high risk situations" - high speed tackles, upright tackles, tackles from the front, and active shoulder tackles.

The next step was to take present that risk spectrum to players, coaches and referees, and allow them to make suggestions on ways to shift behaviour in such a way as to go from the right side - high risk situations - to the left.

That's what we did, and a panel consisting of Eddie Jones, Paul O'Connell, Allain Rolland, Augustin Pichot, rugby medical doctors, scientists, other officials and former players met to discuss strategies we might employ to reduce the head injury risk.

The outcome was the prioritisation of lower tackle heights. Why? Because our data had found that risk of a head injury increased by 40% if the tackler was upright and that the overall risk was four times greater for head-to-head and head-to-shoulder impacts.

So, the directive from the experts was: Get the tackler lower down, in a position where head-to-head and head-to-shoulder contacts would occur less often. Law change is one way to do that, and that's what you saw on January 3. Other ways - education, teaching better technique - will follow in coming months.

But, for now, the hope is players will respond to the threat of penalties and cards by lowering tackle heights and, that the rates of concussions will drop as a result. There will be some controversy. But safety matters, and this is, hopefully, a good step.

subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now