Health on line as rugby takes heavy toll

As America’s National Football League (NFL) prepares to tackle a class action lawsuit filed by over 4,000 former professional players relating to the onset of dementia after retirement, consultant Dr Bill Tormey has expressed his concern about the future health of Ireland’s rugby players who repeatedly endure an “extreme hammering” due to the physical nature of the modern game.

Ireland’s ever-growing injury list over the current Six Nations campaign has again shone the spotlight on the frequency of injuries in rugby union and raised questions about the long-term safety of being a professional rugby player.

Gordon D’Arcy, Keith Earls, Peter O’Mahony, Jonathan Sexton, Brian O’Driscoll, Sean O’Brien, Chris Henry, Dave McSharry, Mike McCarthy, Simon Zebo and Donnacha Ryan have all been on the treatment table since the Six Nations kicked off three weeks ago, with O’Mahony suffering concussion in the opening game against Wales.

Speaking on 98FM’s ‘Now That’s What I Call Sport’ show, Dr Tormey blamed the increased physicality and intensity of a modern rugby match for the rise in injuries.

“I think the game is extraordinarily hard,” he remarked. “I think when we did the Grand Slam in 2009 we were very lucky with injuries.

“This season we’ve had wear and tear injuries because the hammering the bodies are taking is so extreme these days. That’s what’s wrong with Paul O’Connell, he got so hammered for so long that he’s got a back problem.”

The IRB addressed the issue of head injuries and concussions in rugby union by introducing a new rule in 2012 which allowed for a five-minute pitchside assessment to deduce if a player is showing signs of concussion.

While this new rule safeguards against the dangerous scenario of a player continuing to play when concussed, it fails to address the dangers of the collisions in the sport which give rise to head injuries.

According to Dr Tormey, it is this constant exposure to head injuries that has sparked the lawsuit in America and could be the cause of health problems for rugby players in the future.

“If you look at the NFL in America, there’s a class action going on over there that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars because dementia is kicking in with a very significant minority of players who played professional American football and dementia is a result of continuous head injuries.

“There was a meeting in Beaumont about a year ago at which one of these American guys came over from Boston and he was showing the scans and psychometric testing that was being done on American footballers and it would frighten the life out of you, about 40% had brain damage.”

A quick glance back over Ireland’s games against Wales and England will go a long way to explaining why so many players have fallen victim to injury in the current campaign. Both games were played with a ferocious intensity, putting tremendous physical demands on the players’ bodies.

With a new breed of rugby player coming through bigger, stronger and more aggressive than ever before the sport is only going to get more combustible.

Dr Tormey believes increased squad depth, allowing coaches to rest a full team of players from one week to the next, is the only way the sport can continue in its current guise.

“I think you get injured every two-point-something games in rugby at the moment.

“If you look at the physical toll of the Welsh match, Ireland made 160 tackles approximately. If you think about professional boxing, people only fight every few months.

“You’re getting to a stage now where all the big clubs in rugby union, France for example, have two international teams and I think the Irish international team will basically need two teams in effect.”