This is very sad news, one of my all time greats. Go well mad dog
V sad
I remember this guy well
So sad. Thompson, Vickery, Moody. The rest of the English pack looking over their shoulders.
I'm pretty worried for the future of rugby.
Each week more and more guys get more and more serious injuries - Bristol lost 3 absolute stars to injury in the first game of the season, and all will probably be out for several months.
Games are now lasting over 2 hours simply due to the number of times the medics have to spend on the pitch.
The only way to add this is to try reduce the power/weight of the players. A maximum weight allowance each match-day squad seems the only realistic way forward.
Reduced substitution fixes this ...more focus on being able to play for 80 not being a massive unit to come on and smash for 20.
I think rugby long term as we know it is dead
Very sad. Horrible condition.
The only limited comfort I can see is that it is very concentrated timewise. We aren't seeing it in the generation after that.
Hopefully that's down to cutting down player workloads rather than lack of coverage.
The average is 1 in 300 accross the board according to the MNDA
Stephen Hawking also had it, so maybe we need to look at the workload of physicists as well. If you study physics at university and play rugby (or football) you are stuffed...
The reason the medics are on the pitch so much is that they now come on to check anything that looks like a head injury and also the gum shields now notify them if someone has had a bang. That all seems to be a good thing and gone are the days when they only took you off if you were visibly out cold.
I do though think there needs to be a huge study into the effects on young bodies of intensive training as we seem to be producing a generation of sportsmen who are suffering problems in their 20's that they shouldn't be suffering until much later in life. Even back in the 90's I had one sports coach who appreciated that some activities just weren't appropriate for teenagers who were still growing.
That was rare indeed for a sports coach in the 90s Sailo
As Sailo said (albeit they are also on to rifle through pockets for loose change, spare cigarettes etc, it's not a well-paid gig).
It seems that the link is possibly excessive strenuous activity rather than contact per se.
The way to limit it would be maximum fitness and training levels. (Which would also improve the game, reduce risk from slide-offs etc), but how the heck you'd do that...
I do think rugby in its current ultra violent form does probably have an expiring shelf life, which ofc is a shame in a way. Terrible to see former heroes struck down like this tho, and Moody is no age to be faced with this.
Weight limits are clearly not workable - you don't deal with player welfare by having half the team cutting weight in the three days before a match.
The subs point is a good one and is one that most people land on, but again is a player welfare issue - if you only have, say, three subs, and you get four or more injuries then players will play on through injury - tired bodies more likely to take and make head shots.
Subs for injuries only is just massively open to abuse (capsulegate or whatever it was labelled).
Fewer players = rugby league (shock horror)
I suspect some restriction on subs in on its way but no idea if it will work
Fewer players is a weird suggestion
League players get injured all the time
Cam I don't just mean MND but also joint issues.
Indeed Grey but seems someone in the karate world figured that doing press ups on your knuckles wasn't good for hands were bones were still solidifying so we no longer had to do them. Was also known that a few people had caused themselves joint problems by obsessively practising kicks and the like. You can see it with Raducanu having wrist and ankle ops in her early 20's.
The idea behind having fewer players is that you get more gaps opening up in the field, fewer tacklers, fewer breakdowns, fewer head on tackles and fewer hits (go far enough and you get 7s and I don't think (hope at least) pro 7s players won't have these head injury issues)
Incidentally this was why league went down to 13 all those years ago
League did it to make money (and keep wagebills down). Caring for althletes back than was about ensuring brylcream levels were kept topped up.
I agree about numbers though, as defences get better you have to go into contact to create the space.. 13 also has the advantage of getting rid of flankers who are borderline criminals and make place untidy.
If fewer players doesn't make game more open, how does sevens work?
"Cam I don't just mean MND but also joint issues"
These can be avoided by making sure everybody has time to finish them and puts the roaches in the sandbox provided
Even back in the 90's I had one sports coach who appreciated that some activities just weren't appropriate for teenagers who were still growing.
30 years later I'm definitely paying the price for doing a sport in my late teens and early 20s which was both very asymmetric on the body and involving motions repeated thousands of times per week.
And not it was not "international standard vvanking" before any of you lot start.
13 a side didn’t do Rob burrow much good.
Elite athletes running at high speed and smashing into each other is bound to be a risk. In terms of the future, it’s for the players to decide whether it’s risk they can tolerate
How do you know he wouldn't have got it earlier? Or whether he'd be the 1 in 300 that gets it anyway? Or how many more or less RL players have it?
This is part of the problem, the numbers are small and nobody knows the causation.
Also, that was the first generation of RU players to have made enough to just be famous ex-players. Most international stars at most things just become working people with interesting stories.
of all the players of his era, Moody was the worst (/best) for sticking his head in ungodly places, taking and giving lots of big hits in including head shots, and often carrying on with clear concussion
as above, the RFU etc can de-risk but never eliminate the risk and players/bodies will need to decide if it's a risk that can be borne...as do F1, boxing, skiing etc...those mostly have the advantage though of bringing quick death rather than slow death
I had it down as county-level smoking...
And in the Benson and Hedges league, Somerset beat Oxfordshire 4 packs to 3 in one sitting, Smith (Oxon) sent off for phleghming
From what I can see MND is a collection of diseases, a lot of which are genetic. But a link has also been established to contact sports. I love rugby (both codes) but between the high-profile MND and head injury/dementia cases it's got a real problem; I don't know the answer other than not to play it.
Cam doing some world class ostriching on this thread. Pro rugby either embraces the violence and danger (a la combat sports) and or it dies. Either way the amateur game dies.
Go on, where am I ostritching? (BTW, you do know what other sport I help with, don't you?)
in the same way other amateur combat sports have died? wtf are you talking about meurs
Rugby League always allowed high shots and leading with the forearm (still does to a degree) that haven't been allowed in union in decades
The principle some seem to be missing is that if you make more players play for 80 mins rather than 40, then there has to be more emphasis on fitness and some of the bomb squad type players can't just turn up for 30 mins of knocking people around.
Players generally get tired, gaps open up and less contact ensues and in the longer term players get lighter.
But equally, tired players get injured more often, especially if they have to play on because the three subs have been used.
Boxing and other combat sports are famously mass participation Ego, everyone down the clubhouse of a Saturday afternoon...
Mass participation =/= grassroots. I'd venture by order of magnitude rugby numbers are closer to martial arts than football.
And having been a grassroots motorcycle racer, I can assure you it is very grass-rooty without being mass participation
Tbh smoking was to an international standard.
The sport should probably do more to address the obvious steroid issue, which would reduce the severity of impacts.
Not sure what you're getting your knickers in a twist about Cam. Yes, some weirdos may play amateur rugby in 20 years despite all the known risks. But the amateur club game as we know it is going to die. Clearly the present numbers involved in that are much more significant than amateur (competitive)* combat sports. The fact football is much more popular than both (duh) is irrelevant.
(*So excluding boxercise or whatever.)
Wahey!
The average speed of many club players I’ve seen would make a big tackle properly challenging.
odd 2 dismiss the suggestion of reducing player numbers so quickly. and the responses that there will still be collisions and rugby league has injuries miss the point
reducing the number of players as a suggestion is so as 2 preserve the style and substance of the game while rewarding smaller/lighter players. same with reducing substitutions
weight limits or changing the way impacts happen wouldn’t do that
the other way 2 do it is make new rules for rucks 2 b faster
the change in the rules against head contact, now it’s finally been more or less ironed out, should help reduce head injuries - but won’t reduce body size/shape and won’t be evidenced for many years
I'm not sure making rucks faster helps, have you seen the way players fly into rucks? You can barely win a ruck other than in the first few seconds, so recklessness is required
In retrospect, I think my forced retirement at 22 was probably a good thing. I was very much in the small lairy bastard running full plet at much bigger people mould. Several concussions, each addressed with a cold sponge and a play on lad.
I totally agree with that Grey Area (although I don't think league really allows "high shots", but that's a bit of a tangent).
League players haven't really changed much in size in the last 25 years because (i) they were already professionals (ii) you don't need the absolutely huge players you get in union/they need to be more mobile (iii) subs went from 2 to 4 (albeit rolling).
Union on the other hand has 8 subs, which means most of the pack is usually replaced. This makes it a worse spectacle and I'm sure drives the sheer size of impact players and increases injuries. I'd cap subs at 4.
as an ex-union player I find watching union dull as dishwater these days....league is much more exciting and dare I say itfooty beats them all by miles as a spectator sport
I’m In terms of the future of the sport I think there will probably be ever more touch/rip tag rugby played at an amateur level with only small numbers progressing to full contact (so much like martial arts in a way).
Completely agree that more stringent drug testing is needed at the pro level and that would help a lot. Coming down to 13 players would be a shame for the game as a spectacle in my view but probably does have merit from a safety standpoint.
"Several concussions, each addressed with a cold sponge and a play on lad."
That's terrible. Coach should have shone a Maglite into your eyes to check for brain function before sending you back on at the very least.
Heh, how young r u sisto?
Maglite in the late 80s-early 90s indeed. Yeah, alongside our nutritionist and sports psychologist!
There's one game at andover I have no recollection of playing at all. Came round in the car on the way back asking if we were there. I scored a try apparently
I see moody is within a month the same age as me so he'll have been through the same sort of lack of care at junior levels no doubt
I'm not sure making rucks faster helps, have you seen the way players fly into rucks? You can barely win a ruck other than in the first few seconds, so recklessness is required
m7, u missed the point of my post in exactly the way my post explained others were missing the point
the point of faster rucks is not 2 lessen the impact of the ruck ffs. the point is 2 adjust the game 2 reward teams with gr7er mobility - and, by extension, lower weight/power at the impact point
if u have a problem with ruck collisions, just do rugby league
He played for Bracknell apparently at Junior level. Could well have played him at a tournament long ago. I think I only won two tournaments ever - the hampshire cup at u16 and a colts 7s tournament. Oh and a pub 7s at Petersfield for a now sadly defunct establishment owned by a chum's dad.
Delphers you haven't explained how faster rucks do what you say.
Faster rucks just mean less people committed to them meaning more fat lads standing off waiting for the next one.
V sad
I remember this guy well
So sad. Thompson, Vickery, Moody. The rest of the English pack looking over their shoulders.
I'm pretty worried for the future of rugby.
Each week more and more guys get more and more serious injuries - Bristol lost 3 absolute stars to injury in the first game of the season, and all will probably be out for several months.
Games are now lasting over 2 hours simply due to the number of times the medics have to spend on the pitch.
The only way to add this is to try reduce the power/weight of the players. A maximum weight allowance each match-day squad seems the only realistic way forward.
Reduced substitution fixes this ...more focus on being able to play for 80 not being a massive unit to come on and smash for 20.
I think rugby long term as we know it is dead
Very sad. Horrible condition.
The only limited comfort I can see is that it is very concentrated timewise. We aren't seeing it in the generation after that.
Hopefully that's down to cutting down player workloads rather than lack of coverage.
The average is 1 in 300 accross the board according to the MNDA
https://www.mndassociation.org/about-mnd/mnd-explained/what-causes-mnd/is-there-link-between-sport-and-mnd
Which is truly frightening.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/articles/c39ryp8rdnmo
Stephen Hawking also had it, so maybe we need to look at the workload of physicists as well. If you study physics at university and play rugby (or football) you are stuffed...
The reason the medics are on the pitch so much is that they now come on to check anything that looks like a head injury and also the gum shields now notify them if someone has had a bang. That all seems to be a good thing and gone are the days when they only took you off if you were visibly out cold.
I do though think there needs to be a huge study into the effects on young bodies of intensive training as we seem to be producing a generation of sportsmen who are suffering problems in their 20's that they shouldn't be suffering until much later in life. Even back in the 90's I had one sports coach who appreciated that some activities just weren't appropriate for teenagers who were still growing.
That was rare indeed for a sports coach in the 90s Sailo
As Sailo said (albeit they are also on to rifle through pockets for loose change, spare cigarettes etc, it's not a well-paid gig).
https://sheffield.ac.uk/news/frequent-strenuous-exercise-increases-chance-developing-mnd-genetically-risk-individuals
It seems that the link is possibly excessive strenuous activity rather than contact per se.
The way to limit it would be maximum fitness and training levels. (Which would also improve the game, reduce risk from slide-offs etc), but how the heck you'd do that...
I do think rugby in its current ultra violent form does probably have an expiring shelf life, which ofc is a shame in a way. Terrible to see former heroes struck down like this tho, and Moody is no age to be faced with this.
Weight limits are clearly not workable - you don't deal with player welfare by having half the team cutting weight in the three days before a match.
The subs point is a good one and is one that most people land on, but again is a player welfare issue - if you only have, say, three subs, and you get four or more injuries then players will play on through injury - tired bodies more likely to take and make head shots.
Subs for injuries only is just massively open to abuse (capsulegate or whatever it was labelled).
Fewer players = rugby league (shock horror)
I suspect some restriction on subs in on its way but no idea if it will work
Fewer players is a weird suggestion
League players get injured all the time
Cam I don't just mean MND but also joint issues.
Indeed Grey but seems someone in the karate world figured that doing press ups on your knuckles wasn't good for hands were bones were still solidifying so we no longer had to do them. Was also known that a few people had caused themselves joint problems by obsessively practising kicks and the like. You can see it with Raducanu having wrist and ankle ops in her early 20's.
The idea behind having fewer players is that you get more gaps opening up in the field, fewer tacklers, fewer breakdowns, fewer head on tackles and fewer hits (go far enough and you get 7s and I don't think (hope at least) pro 7s players won't have these head injury issues)
Incidentally this was why league went down to 13 all those years ago
League did it to make money (and keep wagebills down). Caring for althletes back than was about ensuring brylcream levels were kept topped up.
I agree about numbers though, as defences get better you have to go into contact to create the space.. 13 also has the advantage of getting rid of flankers who are borderline criminals and make place untidy.
If fewer players doesn't make game more open, how does sevens work?
"Cam I don't just mean MND but also joint issues"
These can be avoided by making sure everybody has time to finish them and puts the roaches in the sandbox provided
Even back in the 90's I had one sports coach who appreciated that some activities just weren't appropriate for teenagers who were still growing.
30 years later I'm definitely paying the price for doing a sport in my late teens and early 20s which was both very asymmetric on the body and involving motions repeated thousands of times per week.
And not it was not "international standard vvanking" before any of you lot start.
13 a side didn’t do Rob burrow much good.
Elite athletes running at high speed and smashing into each other is bound to be a risk. In terms of the future, it’s for the players to decide whether it’s risk they can tolerate
How do you know he wouldn't have got it earlier? Or whether he'd be the 1 in 300 that gets it anyway? Or how many more or less RL players have it?
This is part of the problem, the numbers are small and nobody knows the causation.
Also, that was the first generation of RU players to have made enough to just be famous ex-players. Most international stars at most things just become working people with interesting stories.
of all the players of his era, Moody was the worst (/best) for sticking his head in ungodly places, taking and giving lots of big hits in including head shots, and often carrying on with clear concussion
as above, the RFU etc can de-risk but never eliminate the risk and players/bodies will need to decide if it's a risk that can be borne...as do F1, boxing, skiing etc...those mostly have the advantage though of bringing quick death rather than slow death
I had it down as county-level smoking...
And in the Benson and Hedges league, Somerset beat Oxfordshire 4 packs to 3 in one sitting, Smith (Oxon) sent off for phleghming
From what I can see MND is a collection of diseases, a lot of which are genetic. But a link has also been established to contact sports. I love rugby (both codes) but between the high-profile MND and head injury/dementia cases it's got a real problem; I don't know the answer other than not to play it.
Cam doing some world class ostriching on this thread. Pro rugby either embraces the violence and danger (a la combat sports) and or it dies. Either way the amateur game dies.
Go on, where am I ostritching? (BTW, you do know what other sport I help with, don't you?)
in the same way other amateur combat sports have died? wtf are you talking about meurs
Rugby League always allowed high shots and leading with the forearm (still does to a degree) that haven't been allowed in union in decades
The principle some seem to be missing is that if you make more players play for 80 mins rather than 40, then there has to be more emphasis on fitness and some of the bomb squad type players can't just turn up for 30 mins of knocking people around.
Players generally get tired, gaps open up and less contact ensues and in the longer term players get lighter.
But equally, tired players get injured more often, especially if they have to play on because the three subs have been used.
Boxing and other combat sports are famously mass participation Ego, everyone down the clubhouse of a Saturday afternoon...
Mass participation =/= grassroots. I'd venture by order of magnitude rugby numbers are closer to martial arts than football.
And having been a grassroots motorcycle racer, I can assure you it is very grass-rooty without being mass participation
Tbh smoking was to an international standard.
The sport should probably do more to address the obvious steroid issue, which would reduce the severity of impacts.
Not sure what you're getting your knickers in a twist about Cam. Yes, some weirdos may play amateur rugby in 20 years despite all the known risks. But the amateur club game as we know it is going to die. Clearly the present numbers involved in that are much more significant than amateur (competitive)* combat sports. The fact football is much more popular than both (duh) is irrelevant.
(*So excluding boxercise or whatever.)
Wahey!
The average speed of many club players I’ve seen would make a big tackle properly challenging.
odd 2 dismiss the suggestion of reducing player numbers so quickly. and the responses that there will still be collisions and rugby league has injuries miss the point
reducing the number of players as a suggestion is so as 2 preserve the style and substance of the game while rewarding smaller/lighter players. same with reducing substitutions
weight limits or changing the way impacts happen wouldn’t do that
the other way 2 do it is make new rules for rucks 2 b faster
the change in the rules against head contact, now it’s finally been more or less ironed out, should help reduce head injuries - but won’t reduce body size/shape and won’t be evidenced for many years
I'm not sure making rucks faster helps, have you seen the way players fly into rucks? You can barely win a ruck other than in the first few seconds, so recklessness is required
In retrospect, I think my forced retirement at 22 was probably a good thing. I was very much in the small lairy bastard running full plet at much bigger people mould. Several concussions, each addressed with a cold sponge and a play on lad.
I totally agree with that Grey Area (although I don't think league really allows "high shots", but that's a bit of a tangent).
League players haven't really changed much in size in the last 25 years because (i) they were already professionals (ii) you don't need the absolutely huge players you get in union/they need to be more mobile (iii) subs went from 2 to 4 (albeit rolling).
Union on the other hand has 8 subs, which means most of the pack is usually replaced. This makes it a worse spectacle and I'm sure drives the sheer size of impact players and increases injuries. I'd cap subs at 4.
as an ex-union player I find watching union dull as dishwater these days....league is much more exciting and dare I say itfooty beats them all by miles as a spectator sport
I’m In terms of the future of the sport I think there will probably be ever more touch/rip tag rugby played at an amateur level with only small numbers progressing to full contact (so much like martial arts in a way).
Completely agree that more stringent drug testing is needed at the pro level and that would help a lot. Coming down to 13 players would be a shame for the game as a spectacle in my view but probably does have merit from a safety standpoint.
"Several concussions, each addressed with a cold sponge and a play on lad."
That's terrible. Coach should have shone a Maglite into your eyes to check for brain function before sending you back on at the very least.
Heh, how young r u sisto?
Maglite in the late 80s-early 90s indeed. Yeah, alongside our nutritionist and sports psychologist!
There's one game at andover I have no recollection of playing at all. Came round in the car on the way back asking if we were there. I scored a try apparently
I see moody is within a month the same age as me so he'll have been through the same sort of lack of care at junior levels no doubt
m7, u missed the point of my post in exactly the way my post explained others were missing the point
the point of faster rucks is not 2 lessen the impact of the ruck ffs. the point is 2 adjust the game 2 reward teams with gr7er mobility - and, by extension, lower weight/power at the impact point
if u have a problem with ruck collisions, just do rugby league
He played for Bracknell apparently at Junior level. Could well have played him at a tournament long ago. I think I only won two tournaments ever - the hampshire cup at u16 and a colts 7s tournament. Oh and a pub 7s at Petersfield for a now sadly defunct establishment owned by a chum's dad.
Delphers you haven't explained how faster rucks do what you say.
Faster rucks just mean less people committed to them meaning more fat lads standing off waiting for the next one.
Very sad news, this.
M8 of mine was at school with him.
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