RugbyRebels

http://www.sarugbymag.co.za/how-tough-t ... -the-game/


Article says much more, but here's a snapshot...




THE RESEARCH STUDY


World Rugby’s research team, led by Tucker, studied 611 incidents that resulted in HIAs and compared them to more than 3,500 tackles that didn’t cause head injuries.


The most significant discovery was that 335 HIA injuries occurred while making a tackle and 129 while being tackled.


‘That was surprising and challenging from a legal perspective, because the law is almost exclusively written to protect the ball-carrier, who is on the receiving end of most instances of foul play,’ says Tucker.


The research team then looked at why the tackler is 2.6 times more at risk of a head injury than the ball-carrier, with every analysed tackle scored according to 20 or so factors, including the following:


• Relative speed of players: Backline players are twice as likely to get injured while making a tackle than forwards, probably because backs tend to engage in higher speed tackles. High-speed tackles are more dangerous than medium-speed tackles, which are more dangerous than static tackles.


• Nature of the head contact in the tackle: Was it head to head, head to shoulder, head to hip, head to knee, etc? Head to head contact is six times more risky than head to hip contact. The ideal target for the tackler is between the sternum and the waist of the ball-carrier. Overall, the risk of injury is 4.3 times higher for legal tackles with higher contact (shoulder and head to head) than legal tackles with lower contact (below the shoulder).



• Body position of the ball-carrier and tackler: Were they upright, bent at the waist or diving/falling? As either of the players can be in one of three positions, there are nine possible combinations. The most injuries occur when both players are upright. The lowest risk for the ball-carrier is when he is bent at the waist, no matter what the tackler does. For the tackler, the risk is lowest when diving and highest when upright. ‘The key message here was that an upright tackler is the situation we want to avoid, because it is higher risk and happens quite often,’ says Tucker. ‘The safest tackle is one where the tackler is bent at the waist or diving.’


• Type of tackle: Was it an active or passive shoulder or a smother tackle? The research team then produced a spectrum of risk, and worked out which type of tackles were more and less likely to cause a head injury. ‘Once we knew that, we could look at substituting high-risk tackles with low-risk tackles,’ says Tucker. ‘One way to eliminate high-risk tackles would be to ban tackling, but obviously that’s not an option. That would be like banning cars to prevent car accidents. Instead, we wanted to look at ways to shift behaviour away from high risk towards low risk. That meant, for instance, getting tacklers lower and bent at the waist, lowering the speed of the tackle, or having fewer front- on tackles. Of course, some of these are feasible, others are not, and our challenge was to identify where a difference could realistically be made. That’s where the expert multidisciplinary working group came in.’

One thing that would be nice to factor is the body position of the tackled player. That body position of the ball carrier into contact has changed dramatically over the years.

I never would have thought that tackling as you and I were taught could be the safest!

I've got an idea: ban the choke tackle, well soft ban by not letting it count as a turnover.

Take out the choke tackle and you further establish the primacy of the bigger ball carrier. The choke is one of the remaining options for smaller defenders to work together instead of getting knocked back in contact

What happened to the good old fashioned tackling around the legs and then trying to jackal for the ball. If we do persist with the choke tackle then can we at least stop players floppping over the ball or wriggling on to the wrong side once it’s hit the ground.

Quite. As a smaller flanker, my entire game was based upon a chop tackle and getting back on my feet to compete for the ball. Worked for me ... albeit it amateur level where players aren’t huge, athletic monsters.

Although if we’re going to reduce tackle height, I’d like to see ‘tackler’s rights’ reinstated to improve competition for the ball.

Mellsblue wrote:What happened to the good old fashioned tackling around the legs and then trying to jackal for the ball. If we do persist with the choke tackle then can we at least stop players floppping over the ball or wriggling on to the wrong side once it’s hit the ground.

That was massively reduced in effectiveness when tacklers rights were removed, no longer being able to attack the ball from where you land, means you either have to be quick enough to get around, or strong/big enough to fling the player to the ground rather than chop.

Raggs wrote:

Mellsblue wrote:What happened to the good old fashioned tackling around the legs and then trying to jackal for the ball. If we do persist with the choke tackle then can we at least stop players floppping over the ball or wriggling on to the wrong side once it’s hit the ground.

That was massively reduced in effectiveness when tacklers rights were removed, no longer being able to attack the ball from where you land, means you either have to be quick enough to get around, or strong/big enough to fling the player to the ground rather than chop.

Agree completely. All I’m saying is that, if we have to choose between protecting tacklers rights or the choke tackle, I fall on the side of tacklers rights by quite some distance.

We could try insisting players stay on their feet, without sealing off the ball will still be contestable. Tacklers rights going was more about making the picture easier for the ref to follow

Stumbled across this this afternoon, Shane Williams documentary on concussion. I haven't watched yet, but intend to in the next couple of days.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m ... ion-and-me

Digby wrote:Take out the choke tackle and you further establish the primacy of the bigger ball carrier. The choke is one of the remaining options for smaller defenders to work together instead of getting knocked back in contact

Choke tackles tend to be a fairly low speed collision as well. It's hard to accelerate into a tackle and then wrap the player up without hitting the deck or leaving the player with an arm free to offload.

Absolutely nothing wrong with a choke tackle, used to be one of my better attributes. I'd defend on the blindside of the scrum and take the impact from the big ball carrier. No chance of pulling the ball out their hands most the time but I could just go limp and as 14 stone of dead weight concentrate on staying on my feet and keep moving sidewards until support came. I've had three or four concussions over the years and none came from choke tackle.

The most dangerous ones are normally when two defenders go in for the same tackle. Led to my worst where my vision was best described as pixelated for about 5 minutes afterwards.

Scrumhead wrote:Quite. As a smaller flanker, my entire game was based upon a chop tackle and getting back on my feet to compete for the ball. Worked for me ... albeit it amateur level where players aren’t huge, athletic monsters.

Although if we’re going to reduce tackle height, I’d like to see ‘tackler’s rights’ reinstated to improve competition for the ball.

Same for me as a small centre. I'd chop and then either my 12 or one of my back row if I was at 12 would be straight onto the ball.

But my worry is that this would increase the kamikaze pile into rucks in order to clear people out of the way where players come with a downward motion, rather than coming low and then driving up and away over the ball.

https://amp.smh.com.au/sport/it-s-at-th ... 56dqf.html

'It's at the stage of mild dementia ... and he's only 40 years old'

Came here to post that article. It's absolutely shocking.

Apologies, I've just scanned the article quickly but is there any definition for what constitutes "bent at the waist"? I know the metrics here will be skewed somewhat by the number of times forwards pick and go around the rucks. That's obviously going to lead to a lot of low speed tackles where the body position is bent at the waist but because of the speed of both parties the likelihood of HIA was low. I'm intrigued to know what bent at the waist in an open field setting is going to be.

I agree with the stance of penalising the high tackle to reduce the height of the tackler for sure, makes a lot of sense. Given the prevalence of the head to elbow contact requiring an HIA is there going to be a clamping down on the leading arm of the ball carrier? Head to knee and head to hip are unavoidable given that the tackler is required to tackle lower.

This looks like an interesting breakthrough if it holds up in larger studies: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/56494264

Puja

That's really exciting, had gone quiet for a while but great steps have been made. Just needs enough cash thrown at it now.

Puja wrote:This looks like an interesting breakthrough if it holds up in larger studies: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/56494264

Puja

First mentioned 4 years ago: http://www.rugbyrebels.co/board/viewtop ... 463#p91463
Brilliant that it's such a high specificity; if it's equally sensitive; then that'll be a real game-changer for management; though DNA testing (and time to create the biomarkers) is unlikely to ever reach pitch-side.

I'll be very interested to see the actual research (As far as I can tell, it's not been published yet)

ETA: Found it; just not listed on Pubmed yet: https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2021 ... 020-103274

ETA: It's RNA testing, not DNA; which I think makes things comparatively easier / cheaper.
Gives good results in the post-game (undefined time post-injury event) and 36-48 hours post-game; so potentially (very) useful at the amateur level for collecting saliva before leaving the club.
Short-term (after more research and validation), I don't see this replacing current pitchside HIAs; or being particularly useful for elite sport. However, if this can be made validated with larger trial size, and get the costs down; then this will make a HUGE difference at amateur level.
Longer-term: It would be great if we can get some more accurate time-frames on sample collection, and even a pre-match base-line for each individual; combine that with much quicker sample testing, and it MIGHT get down to being useable pitch-side; as another part of the HIA

We, Rugby, are up in front of the DCMS on this right now, along with a lot of other sports. Football and boxing thoroughly pissed off the MPs yesterday with neither taking it seriously, the suspicion it seems football doesn't want to take it seriously because it'd make it easier to sue the game, and football wouldn't even say how much it's spending on research. Rugby came across somewhat better, but we still had Bracken shocking them when talking about stuff he couldn't remember, and the MPs aren't exactly impressed that most of the money in UK sport for dementia research is coming out of the USA.

We've not heard from the MPs about their own failings in all this, only so far some of their thoughts on the failings of others. Football will get the biggest kicking because it has by far the most money it's not using to even try to help. But football also has so much money there's little the DCMS can do to hit football, the DCMS is much better able to channel funding that is dependent on dementia research and support being in place to sports that are more reliant on central funding.

It’s proprietary IP so not a lot of details available. The RNA aspect of it means that it assesses the response of the metabolome in real time during early phases of trauma. RNA is directly wired into acute changes in gene expression that respond to insult. It uses non-coding RNA, which doesn’t carry the message from genes that translates into protein but are species that are mobilized to effect regulation of specific genes.

This company is going to make a mint if the markers are validated. #invest soon.

The other thing we really need from this is information on the biomarkers returning to normal.
Clinically speaking, the really tough bit, and the bit that REALLY needs improving, is the return to play protocols.
We're using the best we've got; but it basically amounts to "try doing stuff, and if you shouldn't have, then we'll find out afterwards".
If these biomarkers returning to normal can be used to judge improvement instead; then that'd be brilliant.

Thought this was interesting.



And presumably not an elaborate April fools joke...

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/10/527

Which Tyler wrote:https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/10/527

That's really interesting, thanks.