The case for changing kick-offs in the NRL is open and shut

If it pleases the court, I should like to approach the bench once more.

Her Honour will recall that in May of this year, I penned a column highlighting the legal insanity of allowing long kick-offs in the NRL to continue when we could all easily see the brain damage that was resulting before our very eyes.

I noted the sad juxtaposition that even in a week that the most revered rugby league player of the modern era, Wally Lewis, was making a landmark speech about suffering early dementia from having had too many concussions, the NRL was still presiding over players like Jared Waerea-Hargreaves running full tilt at St George Illawarra centre Moses Suli in the first tackle of the Anzac Day match, which saw JWH’s left arm connect with Suli’s melon. You’ll recall how Suli went down like a sack of spuds, lying on the turf unmoving, with vacant eyes.

As you will also remember, there was contact between Suli and a teammate a split-second before JWH arrived at a great rate of knots which put Suli off-balance. But, irrespective of the lead-up, the result was a terrible one.

Your Honour, you will recall I said this cannot have come as a surprise to either the NRL or anyone with common sense. Tackling big men from a 10-metre run-up is hard enough – but tackling men the size of JWH at full tilt? How the hell could you not have regular devastating concussive collisions?

I contended that columns like mine should serve as evidence in a future class action of Brain-Damaged NRL Players vs The NRL, to demonstrate that the league administrators were openly warned that they were grossly breaching their duty of care to their employees by allowing long kick-offs to continue, long after it was known what damage they caused.

Nelson Asofa-Solomona’s tackle on Lindsay Collins.Credit: Nine

Citing the example of the recent rule changes in the NFL – designed to reduce exactly the same problem, and limit their legal exposure – I said it was bleeding obvious that the NRL would have to make its own change or eventually face legal Armageddon.

Noting it wasn’t just me spouting common sense, I quoted the words said to me by Chris Nowinski, one of the leading concussion advocates in the world: “Any league serious about preventing CTE has to consider getting rid of or changing plays, like the kick-off, where extraordinary head impacts are inevitable. There is no question kick-offs, as they are played today in NRL, meaningfully contribute to players developing CTE. How many former players have to be diagnosed with CTE before we put all options on the table to prevent CTE? Changing kick-offs is low-hanging fruit.”

The outcry at my remarks was as sad as it was predictable.

They continued to centre on the notion that the real problem was not huge men regularly running at each at full tilt. Oh no, it was – if you can believe it – a simple lack of tackling technique! No, really, if the players are trained properly, they could learn to stop a rampaging bull like JWH safely.

Tolu Koula is helped off the field after being knocked out in the first hit-up on Saturday night.Credit: NRL Photos

It was the equivalent of saying if you drove your car straight into the wall at 30 km/h it could be made safe if you just learnt how to tilt your head properly to reduce impact.

(And what happens to those, including kids, who don’t learn the technique? We were never told.)

And so the season progressed with the NRL announcing no future changes to the rule that must be changed, as obvious as it is. Inevitably, however, the problem never went away.

Which is why I approach Her Honour once more, right now.

For – beyond the inevitable concussions through the season – just at the time when the entire mob was watching as the finals got underway, pretty much exactly the same thing has happened again.

A fortnight ago in the Manly-Roosters match we again saw Waerea-Hargreaves get the ball from the opening kick-off and run full-tilt, moving through the gears of his runaway milk truck until all 108kgs of him was approaching Manly’s Tolu Koula, coming the other way, also at full tilt – no small thing, as this 88kg man was a high-school sprinter.

The result, Your Honour, was sickening. In an all but exact replay of the Anzac Day match, JWH’s arm comes into contact with Tolu Koula’s head, at which point Koula suffered – let’s call it for what it is – a brain injury which saw him immediately taken from the field to take no further part in the match.

Get it?

‘Tackling big men from a 10-metre run-up is hard enough – but tackling men the size of JWH at full tilt?’

Same player charging, same time of game, same body part, same absolutely sickening collision, same result. Brain injury – from which, the experts note, one is never quite the same again.

This time, a colleague contended that the problem was not necessarily a lack of tackle technique but the coaches who didn’t ensure they never had small men taking on big men from the kick-off. I submit respectfully – and I mean that, for I have no interest in starting another journalistic civil war – that, again, the analysis is beside the point. The problem is in fact the bleeding obvious one: fit, strong men running flat-out at each other, and everything else is faffing around the edges.

As it happened, sadly, so it proved.

For, last Friday evening, in the preliminary finals, the Storm kicked off and the ball was received by the Roosters 2IC of Big Men, Lindsay Collins, himself a whopper at 106kgs. He, too, moved through the gears and was at full tilt.

Coming the other way, the Storm’s Nelson Asofa-Solomona. He’s 115kgs if he’s an ounce.

Were they both safer, this time, because it was big man on big man? Not a bit of it.

This time it is Asofa-Solomona’s right shoulder that connects with Collins’ jaw, and the Rooster goes down like a sack of spuds, lying face-down on the turf unmoving for several seconds, before getting to his feet like a just-born baby giraffe. He was so unwell he played the ball in the wrong direction. Brain injury.

Your Honour, back in May, I wrote: “When this comes up in a future class action, let the record show: one of the world’s sports concussion experts [in Nowinski] has no trouble identifying the NRL’s long kick-offs as a source of brain damage in the game, and calls for change, just as the NFL has done, and for precisely the same reasons.”

Your Honour, since that time, the NRL has done nothing.

But with every passing match, Your Honour – and with these last two cited examples as devastating cases in point – you can now see the case for aggravated damages. If, in the future, Koula or Collins were to develop problems stemming from brain injury, how could they not point to columns like mine – howling warnings, while citing experts, and noting the NFL’s own rule changes for legal and medical reasons – and make the legitimate case that the NRL’s continued inaction is completely inexcusable and makes them legally culpable?

I go on again Your Honour to what I said the first time before we were so rudely interrupted:

As to how you’d change the rules, there are lots of tweaks possible. Tweak it. Work it. Make it safer.

But the way it is now cannot go on. The NRL faces an existential threat on this. They can’t say they weren’t told.

Thank you, Your Honour.

X/Twitter: @Peter_Fitz

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