Multiple vertebral fractures were discovered in 37% of rugby players in a recent study.
In total 120 vertebral fractures were found in 51 of the 95 players studied.



There are effectively 7 positions in RL
Muscle doesn't protect your bones like fat does. The necessity for players to be fitter than ever before means they have less fat than ever before.


It's established by recent studies that players have proportionately lower bone density than the average person. Rugby players have higher bone density than the average person. But their muscle mass is far higher than the average person. They have a disproportionate amount of muscle compared to bone.


Name me a time in your job you had to withstand the equivalent of being in a 60 mph car crash 20 times in under 2 hours.

The microphone thing that Peacock wore really brought home those impacts. Couldn't pay me to do that week in, week out.

Yep. What brought it home to me was last year I was told by Jason Davidson at a coach development session the force and amount of impacts the players have to withstand in a game.

Now I'm not discounting how tough it was to play in the past, especially as part timers, but I think a lot of people massively underestimate the stress on the body that the modern game has.
A few weeks back Schoey said on Yorkshire Radio (I think) that he once played 3 games in 3 days. Now that was tough and too much back then, but it's impossible to do now. The body simply can't take it.

Schoey might have been knackered after those 3 games in 3 days, and probably a bit battered and bruised. But I doubt he (or the forwards) suffered from severe skeletal muscle damage, which is what happens after just 1 game of RL these days.

I still, and always think, that even if you leave aside the issue of safety (and we shouldn't - any workplace should be made as safe as possible and increased turnaround between games is one obvious and entirely feasible way of doing it), the spectators don't really win from being supplied with more games.

Can the players play on Friday and Monday? Yes, of course they can, and they do. Can they produce the same level of athletic (and mental) performance in both games? No. I watched several games over Easter. The second batch of fixtures were clearly lacking in a bit of quality in most cases.

I think the issue is that, when you compare it to amateur games, or days of yore, we now see ever more finely tuned machines playing at the elite level. We use full time coaching, thousands of quids worth of technology, monitoring and the latest science and nutrition. And we do it all to produce athletes who are micro-specialised to fulfil their role in a game of RL every week. In any industry when you micro-specialise you lose something in the breadth of performance. I think that's what we do with professional RL players, and that's why I am not sure it makes sense to expect them to do the same short turnarounds their part time predecessors did.

Safety-wise, we produce bigger, heavier athletes, who are also faster and more agile. The effect that has on the speed and force of the collisions is noticeable. And there are parts of the body that are not as easy to train as the big driving muscles and the cardio-respiratory system. Things like brains and their casing, spines and to some extent bones in general don't keep up with the pace of development, but they still get dragged into the collisions.

It's a dangerous game, I respect that, so do the players. But the game has to be responsible for not making it more dangerous than it has to be, and the fans will benefit from getting fully fit participants out on the field more often.