Summary:
A two-part policy to improve the safety of professional rugby players and the safety of rugby playing pupils in schools. The first proposal, inspired by Paralympic team sports, is to create weight categories for rugby players with associated points for each category, with only a certain number of points allowed on the pitch at one time, pushing players to become smaller and reducing collision intensity. The second part is to apply the same process in school rugby, so that players are put in teams based on their size as opposed to their age, enhancing pupil safety and overcoming birth-date inequality in school, and subsequently professional, sporting success.
Policy:
Rugby players are huge. Even the backs, who were traditionally very lean and flight of foot, nowadays look more liked the forwards of old.
And Rugby players are fast.
Simple physics tells you that such a situation leads to more forceful collisions, which the human body struggles to cope with.
Having bigger and stronger players hitting each other at faster and faster speeds is a recipe for injury, and the growing concerns over the long-term impact of head-injuries highlight the risks.
Players currently have no incentive to be smaller, and every incentive to be bigger, so a regulation is required to solve the problem.
I propose the government mandates the RFU to introduce a points system for rugby teams, whereby the weight of each player puts them into a particular category with an associated number of points, and there are a maximum number of points allowed on the field at any one time.
A similar system exists for the Paralympics, where teams are made up of players with different levels of disability, and it works well. It also adds an interesting extra tactic into the sports regarding how to manage the team; to go for a lot of middle-point players or one or two high point players and the rest low point players.
A similar system could be used for rugby but based more on the boxing weighting system; each weight category would have points associated with it and players would weigh-in before games and be allocated points, and the team would have a maximum number of points allowed on the field.
Teams could still have one or two enormous players, like a Jonah Lomu of old, but they would then also have to have some featherweights in their side as well.
Rugby players would therefore generally become lighter and leaner, reducing the intensity of collisions and focusing on the skills of footwork and tactics, not simply brute force.
A wider range of players would then be eligible to play, not just giants, and the risk of injury would reduce, while still keeping the fundamental elements of the rugby game intact, maximising viewing enjoyment for fans.
A similar process should also be introduced for school rugby, eradicating the current age-group rugby process and instead basing it on a weighting measure.
The difference in size of teenagers due to when their growth spurt happens makes age a ridiculous and dangerous grouping measure for school rugby. Far better to use the weight system, so pupils are matched based on their size and strength, not just their age.
Not only would this improve pupil safety, but it is also highly likely to lead to an increase in the number and quality of professional rugby players and, if applied to sports more widely, to the total number of all professional sports persons.
Malcolm Gladwell and others have shown how high the percentage of professional sportspeople born in the six months from September to February is, because younger pupils fall behind in physical stature at key stages in their development, and so are lost to the professional game.
If size, not age, determined who pupils played against, many more would have the chance to become professional sportspersons, strengthening the UK’s performance domestically and on the global stage.
Such a policy might also help in the arguments about trans players involvement in sports; instead of basing competition purely on gender or sex, it could also be based on size, weight and strength, helping to level the playing field.
1798-11