It’s been ten years since I first spoke to Peter Robinson about the death of his son Ben, almost to the day. Ben had died of brain swelling after being hit in the head twice in quick succession during a rugby match at school on January 29, 2011. Peter’s grief was raw, but he wanted to talk because he had a story to tell. It was a story about Ben and what happened to him that day, but it was also about more than that. It was a story about a sport that Peter loved, but which he felt could not protect players from the risks of brain injury.
Peter told me about the conversations he had with administrators and politicians, he shared anecdotes and emails, and showed me excerpts and printouts from medical journals and websites. He told me about the sport’s inadequate education programs and medical procedures, and the five-minute on-field concussion assessment they used in the professional game. He described a culture, which I recognized, in which players were praised for making big hits and praised for continuing to play after being injured. At the time, people still claimed that scrum caps were sufficient protection, describing brain injuries as ‘head impacts’ that could ‘walk off’.
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Peter was determined that the game had to change. He wasn’t the only one. Dr. Barry O’Driscoll had just resigned from World Rugby’s medical advisory board in protest at the on-field concussion assessment protocol, which gave medics five minutes to make a diagnosis. Dr. James Robson, who had taken part in six British & Irish Lions tours, also spoke out. Well-known neuropathologist Dr. Willie Stewart did this too. At the Daily Mail, journalist Sam Peters worked on a series of articles exploring these issues. And in Westminster, Chris Bryant, Labor MP for Rhondda, also started asking questions.
There were others, but not as many as those who said they were wrong, that it was all just fear mongering. Men like the head coach who angrily told me that the group was going to kill the sport, or the ex-player who insisted that they wanted to soften the game, or the doctor who announced at a medical conference that the risks had been greatly exaggerated, or the administrators who repeated again and again that the welfare of the players came first and that the sport simply followed the science.
For many years, rugby’s concussion policy was shaped by the Concussion In Sport Group, which produced a consensus document every four years summarizing the latest research on the subject. Here, between Robinson, Stewart, O’Driscoll and the rest, was the beginning of an alternative consensus, a consensus that agreed, in O’Driscoll’s words, that the sport was “getting this very, very wrong had an end.” That same year, the NFL reached a $765 million settlement with a group of 4,500 former players who claimed it misled them about the long-term dangers of head injuries. O’Driscoll was convinced that rugby would eventually face similar claims.
He was right. In December 2020, The Guardian broke the news that a group of former professional players had taken legal action against the game’s authorities as they were likely diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy and, in some cases, early dementia. The first three to float were England internationals Steve Thompson and Michael Lipman, and Wales international Alix Popham. The Guardian interviewed all three and in the months that followed, many more, including Dan Scarbrough, Paul Pook, Alex Abbey and the family of Norman Hadley.
Their pain, their suffering, always seemed to me an indisputable truth. The link between head trauma and CTE has been known for much longer than people sometimes let on, but it is still a complicated and controversial science. But when I close my eyes I can still hear Thompson talking about how he can’t remember winning the World Cup, Lipman describing how he struggles to control his bladder at night, and Popham talking about the time he blacked out while cycling. , and the issues seem very black and white.
There are 268 players involved in the promotion. They don’t all have the same diagnoses or the same symptoms, but they all have their own stories.
On Friday, a Supreme Court judge will decide whether they can proceed with their class action, and if so, which test cases will be presented for hearing. The procedure is still in the pre-action phase and the parties to the dispute have the opportunity to reach an early settlement to avoid a lawsuit.
But the defendants don’t seem inclined to settle at this point. The case is very different from the one involving the NFL players, who did reach a settlement. The accusation there was that the authorities had deliberately misled them, while the accusation in rugby is that they were negligent in their attempts to mitigate the consequences.
A key part of the allegations is that World Rugby was too reliant on the advice of the CISG, and in particular its co-chairman Dr Paul McCrory. In 2022, following an investigation by Retraction Watch and a series of articles in the Guardian, McCrory resigned from the group after being exposed as a serial plagiarist. CISG continues, but their credibility is damaged. They no longer have a monopoly on authority.
That’s just one way the culture of the game has changed in the decade since I first met Robinson. For years, the conversation was stuck in a circular argument about which side was right, and whether more research was needed before the link between head trauma and CTE could be adopted as a mainstream position.
The lawsuit and the McCrory scandal that followed accelerated that conversation. This year, in what felt like a milestone for Robinson, the British government finally issued new Concussion Guidelines for Grassroots Sport, which incorporate ideas he had been advocating for a decade.
The authorities finally appear to be acting with the necessary urgency. Which doesn’t mean they’re doing everything right, far from it, just that they’re no longer insisting there isn’t much wrong.
They are placing a premium on instrumented mouthguards, which will help measure the impact the players experience, and there is also hope for new on-field diagnostic tools and even experimental treatments. World Rugby says it wants to address both the cause and the symptoms. That sounds good. But it’s difficult to balance the financial need to play more often with the medical need to give players more rest.
The unavoidable truth is that rugby is a collision sport. It will be possible to do more to minimize, but not eliminate, the risk of head trauma, especially the repeated small blows associated with grappling and tackling.
The decision to play the game then becomes a matter of weighing risk and reward. The sport will survive these legal proceedings, however they are resolved. But long after they’re over, players, and more importantly the parents of players, will still have to wonder if the game is worth it. And the answer to that could be fatal.