The CTE bombshell will forever change the way rugby league is played

The CTE bombshell that was dropped on rugby league earlier this week will change the sport forever in ways we can’t even anticipate writes PAUL KENT.

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Nothing shortens a man’s step more than a glimpse at his own mortality.

It explains why there isn’t a man around rugby league who today is not in some way examining, measuring or checking himself against the man he used to be.

Steve Roach, for instance, often finds himself starting conversations he has had before.

“Dad,” one of his boys will say, “you’ve already told me that.”

Nobody knows whether the failings of memory are simply young men becoming old men or, the quiet fear, young men growing old before their time.

Mark Carroll is 52 and, he will tell you, still to sprout a grey hair. Certainly the evidence is with Spudd.

Most days Carroll is at his Crown St gym and will step into the boxing ring, about the size of a queen-sized bed, and whoever is opposite him quickly learns there is no other choice but to stand and fight.

Carroll admitted his fears earlier this week. Picture by Justin Lloyd.

Carroll believes the body has memory. It retains all the big knocks the young men take.

How else to explain it when a shot sneaks through and rattles him to his toenails. The vibrations hide in the brain.

Last September a Newcastle doctor asked Paul Sironen if he could study his brain. He asked Sironen if he could bring along Roach.

Roach says he found it “very confronting”.

He was suddenly riddled with anxiety, a condition he has found worsening.

He did a reflex test, for instance, with his left hand and then his right hand. The right hand was far superior, the expected cognitive result for a right-handed man.

Only Roach is left-handed.

He is not alone, and that is why the game is in the process of change.

When news broke Thursday that two former NRL players, now deceased, their identities unknown, tested positive to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) a quick rush of panic spread throughout the game again.

Those memory issues … could it?

Roach was known for his physical play.

The NRL understands the urgency of the new science and the need to make the game safe.

It is an issue the game cannot deal with quickly enough. Collision sports around the world are reducing in numbers and there are long term fears the game’s future

Boxing, once one of the big world sports, now basically exists for the lower class because of the evidence of long term damage. Unless it’s to flee the ghetto, what modern parent can justify putting their child in a ring?

The NRL understands the need for greater it.

Independent doctors on the sideline to spot concussion and mandatory head injury assessments are positive changes.

But is that enough?

The concussion has already happened. The irreversible damage the medical experts fear is now there.

Rugby league was always a tough game.

Old-timers like Roach and Carroll came from an era when the game was legalised violence. Fights happened regularly, and were celebrated.

High tackles as a form of retribution were so common players learned to run with their arms up as protection. Their bumper bars, they called them.

Concussed men fought bravely to their feet and played on.

The game was cleaned up, though, and the violence disappeared. A new era of safety arrived and players dropped their bumper bars, protected by the games rules.

Violence used to be a part of rugby league.

Now most players run with little protection for themselves, their chins up and unprotected.

But the game changed and the rule makers failed to adapt.

Players have got bigger and fitter, the interchange helping keep them fresh, and so the collisions have got bigger.

Tackling changed, too.

Middle forwards are so fresh they no longer struggle to defend, calling on extra efforts.

Instead they remain fresh enough to set themselves and swing their arm - a method to generate momentum through the shoulder and therefore impact to the tackle - which has catastrophic results when they get it a few centimetres wrong and crashes into those unprotected chins.

Everybody is bigger, fitter and fresher, the collisions greater than ever. Even straight forward tackles carry, often, a whiplash effect from the greater force. These, the brain experts call them, are micro-concussions and are believed to be just as dangerous and can be easily disguised by players.

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The NRL had a chance to address it last week by reducing the interchange when the competition committee met.

Instead it got railroaded by some in the room who might actually believe the interchange should remain where it is, so you cannot blame them for that, but whose interests should always be viewed through the prism of elite football and current success.

All the rules today seem designed towards benefiting the bigger players, for the bigger collisions they bring, which brings the highlight moments.

Nobody can say if the concussions are greater or fewer than the old days, given the greater vigilance, but they seem to be happening in almost every game. Could they, in fact, be worse?

Something has to change.

As important as the current concussion protocols are two questions: is it happening quickly enough and are the correct changes being made?

What is being done at NRL level and junior level to change the game?

“I have been advocating for two in a tackle,” Roach said. “I know it wouldn’t be popular at first but there’s been changes ever since they started playing and we always get used to it.”

He also wonders whether a return to the five metre rule, closing the distance between players, would bring down impact.

How will the findings impact junior rugby league?

Behind the scenes some of the game’s smartest are beginning to worry.

How long until insurance companies begin asking at what age do players become a risk of developing CTE? Are there signs at 15? At 10? What is the game doing about it?

At some point the insurers will monetise it, driving insurance costs up. Some fear the game will become unaffordable at junior levels, devastating the game’s grassroots.

While today’s focus is on NRL players, and former NRL players, the brain shows no prejudice between the elite NRL player and the barely competent bush footballer.

Already the Queensland Rugby League is experimenting with tag football in the under-6s in south east Queensland in a bid to give children the experience of playing the game without the contact.

Six-year-olds.

It showed the hardest to change is ingrained thinking.

As quick as the initiative was announced a mother rang talkback radio, her voice rattling with indignity, saying she coached kids and she hated the rule because it wasn’t rugby league and she wasn’t going to listen to any experts.

Kids needed to learn to tackle while they were young, she said.

So she was coaching her three- and four-year-olds to tackle.

Good grief.

Originally published as The CTE bombshell will forever change the way rugby league is played