Anyone else she this programme about the former England rugby player Steve Thompson? Very sad seeing what he's going through at such a young age, I was wincing at the replays of all those hits.
But just as with the related Alan Shearer documentary on heading related dementia, the real killer is the hours of training, with endless hits on the brain.
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The authorities usually come at this from a point of denial. They have to change that. As a football nut, I find it incredibly hard to say that as I fear the consequences and it is a big reason why the sports can't be expected to mark their own homework on this.
One fairly prominent voice on the subject is Carl Frampton and it is interesting to hear him talk about his regrets at the amount of sparring he did in his youth. He strongly advises against regular sparring now and is outspoken at boxers who continue fighting beyond their prime. There need to be more voices in the media like him and beyond the boxing world.
I played hours of football every day and by my late teens was playing headers and volleys for an hour a day. That went on for a good four/five years. I'm in a funny position in that I blossomed late as a player and by the age of 21 was getting a lot of interest from professional teams but then injured my ankle badly and barely played thereafter. I had to stop playing a sport that was my absolute passion and potentially a dream profession.
I look back now and I'm genuinely grateful that it never materialised. The 'Concussion' film a few years back with Will Smith really shocked me and is a must watch. The follow up evidence all suggests that another fifteen years of me heading a football every day would not have done me much good at all. Nothing in life is as important as good health. Football, alongside all other sports, needs to square up to this reality because right now it looks like a cover up driven by commercial interests. Nothing short of a scandal.
Very worrying for rugby players given the numerous traumas to the brain. Concussion is simply not taken seriously.
The rugby authorities need to act asap.
They've also diagnosed a link between Rugby players and MND this week, while further research is required its worth noting former England player Ed Slater, a big Charlton fan, retired as Gloucester skipper this season after his diagnosis.
As a parent it does make me worry about my 9 year old playing Rugby on a Sunday although he plays in goal in football on saturdays so is clearly just destined to be booted in the head...
We got the phone call to come and get him , and ended up taking him to A&E because he had concussion, his brain was in a loop , he couldn't remember what had happened and kept repeating the same stuff again and again, and couldn't say anything different , it was terrifying , and he even had one of those protection hats ( we didn't have them when i was a kid) needless to say scared the life out of me , and put me right off the sport , i don't think he played again, i think the last few years are the tip of the iceberg, what with well known players coming forward and highlighting it.
As a flanker I wasn't taking the hits or car crash like tackles some of the other forwards were apart from a few notable occasions when someone bigger and quicker into the tackle than me hit me, however head injuries frightened me a bit, I saw a guy at a home game go in low on one of our players and took an absolute sickener of a knee to the melon and he was in a really bad way, staggered around, speaking absolute gibberish before violently puking and collapsing. Not only did it make me feel sick the act of his head connecting with our hookers knee but the behaviour afterwards, how he was awake and conscious but not there at all in spirit. We found out months later he had had to stop playing because of that injury.
In training our coaches were fairly sensible and were weren't all smashing into each other like I've seen teams like South Africa do in training camps.
So, I'm going the lo g way about this. Steve Thompson played at a weird time for a guy like him, he played when forwards were big, heavy and slow and when backs were small and fast, that era then became the one we see now, where wingers are built like cruiserweight boxers and can seriously move, then you have forwards who are 120-150 plus kilos of solid muscle. When players take hits now it will legitimately feel like being T Boned by an articulated truck and careers are being shortened because of the intensity of the game. He would have also been going very hard in training, head down, smash into the blocking pads. With men the size of Martin Johnson, Andrew Sheridan, Joe Worsley, Danny Grewcock who are not only enormous but with a mentality of going at everything harder and more powerful than the next man.
I'm surprised there are not more Steve Thomson tales coming out of rugby union to be honest and I agree with all saying the RFU are not being the leading lights they should be on the matter. They have tried to sort some of the more horrible neck and back trauma injuries with how they do the scrums now and what is penalised but the big hits will continues as people fuckong love watching them not to mention two 20 stone men powering into one another is generally going to hurt and even if they collide chest to chest the brain takes a remarkable amount of trauma
In football, heading was a strenfth of my game but I don't recall any discomfort when heading in the opponents area. Where I remember issues were clearances out of defence and clashing heads. I recall an incident, accidental clash of heads, where I think I may have lost conciousness, I'm not sure, but my left eye swelled and closed up pretty quickly and I carried on playing with a wet sponge in my hand. I hope people know enough not to be so stupid today.
I don't think it's an age/dementia things, unless it's your family or close friends.
I have to choose a secondary school in a year's time and am in the catchment of two. One is football, the other is rugby. I have a big leaning to football as I simply don't want him going anywhere near rugby.