Radical thinking required to make the game safer

SHANE WILLIAMS

WALES AND LIONS LEGEND

It was harrowing reading about my old teammate Ryan Jones last weekend. I’m sure everyone has caught up with his story and was probably as shocked as I was that he had been diagnosed with both early-onset dementia and probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at the age of 41.

Reading about him describing his current concerns and his fears for the future was devastating. When you’ve been in the trenches with someone for so long and on so many fronts you only ever remember them at their best. And at his best, Ryan was one of the finest back row forwards in the world. Three Grand Slams, four Celtic Rugby titles a British & Irish Lions tour and 33 games as Welsh captain says all you need to know about him.

He went on to earn an OBE for his charity work after handing up his boots and even came to Tenby to do the Ironman Wales with me a couple of times. Talented, selfless, totally committed and very, very astute, he led with understated authority and from the front.

But everyone knew that before I wrote it, and I don’t want this to turn into an obituary. What he told us made us all sit up and take notice and that’s what World Rugby has to do – take notice and take action!

There are now three high-profile players who I played with during my career who are suffering from CTE. Ryan’s news came on top of the well documented cases concerning my 2003 Welsh World Cup teammate Alix Popham and my 2005 Lions colleague, Steve Thompson.

Is rugby union becoming akin to Russian Roulette? How many more cases are we going to read about?

Now is the time for action – more research, more law changes and maybe even compulsory headwear.

It’s all very well having special mouthguards to assess for concussion, but why not bring in scrum caps for all? You see more and more youngsters wearing them and whatever is good enough for Cheslin Kolbe, Tadgh Beirne, Jonathan Davies, Rory Best and James Haskell should be good enough for all.

The game simply can’t afford to have any more sad stories like this.

It could lead to mums and dads turning their kids towards other sports. We all chose to play the game we love, but none of the players from my era were really aware of some of the potential implications we are now hearing about. It might well have altered my view if I knew then what I’ve read about of late.

Is it time for players to undergo compulsory brain scans once a month, or at regular intervals, to see if problems can be identified before it becomes too late? Everyone talks about having a duty of care to the players, and things are much better now than they were even five years ago, but it is going to take some radical thinking to find a solution that keeps players like Steve, Alix and Ryan safer in the future.

It was Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of America,who claimed ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’.

That’s a phrase the law makers, club coaches and players should keep turning over in their heads.

On a more positive front, a fantastic month of international rugby came to a head with some amazing results. Wales can certainly hold their heads high after a three-match Test series against the world champion Springboks that nobody had predicted. The Japanese came close to upsetting France in the second Test, Scotland were beaten in Argentina by a try after the clock had gone into the red.

Then, of course, we had Ireland beating New Zealand 2-1 in their series down under.

Not only that, their second string recovered from a mauling first time out against the Maori to win the second game. That made it three wins in the space of eight days against New Zealand international sides on their own patch. That is a week the like of which the Home Unions have never seen before.

Head coach Andy Farrell should have been able to tell his team to go home, rest up and then prepare to move forward to win the World Cup in France next year after taking over at the top of the World Rugby rankings. If only it was as simple as that! The World Cup has been a disaster zone for the Irish down the years and they have never gone beyond the quarter-final stage.

Australia, France, Wales twice and Argentina twice have toppled them after the pool stages and it was the All Blacks who sent them packing in the last eight in Japan in 2019.

But this team, guided so superbly by the ageless Johnny Sexton, looks as though it is ready to make its own history. They will fear nobody and have greatly enhanced their strength in depth.

They have South Africa, Fiji and Australia coming to Dublin in the autumn and will then hope to use the 2023 Six Nations as the perfect springboard for France.

Their fixtures take them to Wales, Scotland and Italy and see them facing France and England at the Aviva Stadium. That gives them eight meaningful matches before they get to their World Cup warmup matches next summer. If they carry on in a similar vein to this summer then they will become the team to beat.

The great thing for rugby fans all over the world is that after what we’ve just seen anything could happen next year. As one fan explained this summer, Uruguay beat Romania, who beat Portugal, who drew with Georgia, who beat Italy, who had beaten Wales, who beat South Africa – thus making Uruguay the world champions?

It is never as simple as it seems when writing it down, but at this stage it is almost impossible to say who will win the Webb Ellis Trophy in 2023 – and isn’t that fantastic!