Rugby league is to undergo its biggest makeover in a generation following the approval of major new law changes on tackling, but did it have any alternative?
Tackling above the armpit will be outlawed at all levels from 2025 after being introduced at grassroots level this coming season. It follows the approval of 44 recommendations made by the sport’s Brain Health and Clinical Advisory Group which are set to change the way the game is played.
Other changes will include limits on minutes played per position each season. The reaction has been mixed at best, catastrophic at worst. Many current and former players believe the news signals the end of rugby league as we know it.
Robert Hicks, the former Super League referee now Director of Operations and Legal, insists these changes are not linked to the sport being sued by a group of ex-players, but many believe otherwise.
What is for sure is that Hicks is spot on when stating that “looking after the long-term health of players should always be our priority”.
And this is something that has been for too long neglected and brushed aside as part of the reason we love the sport. It’s brutal and should be so. That’s why we fall in love with the game. Yes, but not at the expense of players welfare.
Kevin Sinfield was man of the match in the 2012 Grand Final. He was knocked out during the game and barely remembers it. He should never have been allowed to play on.
Two of my good friends from that Leeds side are suffering badly right now. Stevie Ward retired early because of concussions. Rob Burrow is dying of Motor Neurone Disease.
Rob himself refuses to accept his illness has anything to do with the blows he took playing the game he loved. Studies though have shown rugby players are more likely to be diagnosed with MND and dementia.
Ward still struggles badly with headaches and depression. He too has refused to join the legal voice against the sport however.
There are so many questions we don’t yet know the answer to. One that sticks in my mind is the impact on our game if the rest of the world - by which we really mean the NRL - follow suit. If not then we are going to be playing a different game, which would make it even tougher to compete internationally.
Will all this bring down insurance premiums that are crippling the game since the legal case? You would have to hope so.
The reality is that rugby league, on and off the field, is in its biggest ever transitional period. Yes the game is about to look very different, but that doesn’t mean it is automatically going to be less attractive. And if it is guaranteed to be safer then us fans absolutely have to give it that chance.
As for the legal case being pursued by a group of former players. I don’t like it, and I don’t particularly respect their reasoning or motives. But the sport moving in a direction that is safer and more inclusive is absolutely something I will get behind.
How else could the RFL have reacted? This may well be an unpopular opinion but carrying on blindly in the face of this moving landscape would absolutely have been a worse call than bracing the sport for a radical redirection.
Elsewhere this week more problems at Salford and also a doping story that the sport could well do without.
The high-profile Red Devils player exodus is set to continue with winger Joe Burgess - tipped by his head coach Paul Rowley for England honours last season - set to depart the club for disciplinary reasons. I’m told the problems started when the player missed training, something Rowley could well do without having lost his other starting winger Ken Sio on compassionate grounds and having already seen his starting 6 and 9 Brodie Croft and Andy Ackers join Leeds Rhinos.
Speaking of Leeds, Rob Burrow this week marked the four-year anniversary of his shattering MND diagnosis, a day upon which he was told he had two years to live.
I write a lot about my pride for Rob, a treasured friend. And I recall that morning four years ago when the message dropped on my phone with the news. I was meeting Rob that day, for Christmas drinks in Leeds. Or at least that was the plan. I was halfway through sending him an abusive message after he had ghosted my calls that week to firm up the time and place. It would instantly be obvious something much bigger was going on. For that message to drop, at that moment, was just devastating.
What he has done in the last four years has been incredible, and a measure of the man. One of the most genuine, humble and selfless people I have the pleasure of knowing.
That doping story this week by the way is an odd one, with Cornwall’s Charley Bodman set for an extended detox from rugby league after being banned for two years for a positive out-of-competition sample.
UK Anti-Doping has already halved the suspension after accepting the breach - for an asthma medicine - was unintentional. I’m told the player basically wasn’t told he needed an exemption certificate to take the drug, and therefore unwittingly breached a rule he wasn’t aware of. Naive but certainly not cheating, and another example perhaps of the problems in the lower echelons of the sport where the support and infrastructure are just not in place to deal with these things.
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