by It is 10 years since I first spoke to Peter Robinson about the death of his young son Ben, almost to the day. Ben died of brain swelling after being hit in the head twice in a row during a school rugby match on 29 January 2011. Peter’s grief was raw, but he wanted to talk because he had a story to tell. he needed to tell. It was a story about Ben and what happened to him that day, but it was also more than that. It was a story about a sport that Peter admired, but which he believed was not protecting its players from the risk of brain injuries.
Peter told me about his conversations with administrators and politicians, shared stories and emails, showed me excerpts and printouts from medical journals and websites. He told me about the inadequate education programs and sports medical procedures, the five minute concussion assessment on the side of the field that they were using in the professional game. He described a culture, a culture I recognised, where players were praised for making big hits and lionized for playing on after they were injured. In those days, people still argued that scrum caps were adequate protection, and described brain injuries as “head hits” that could be “run off”.
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Peter was determined that the game had to be changed. He wasn’t the only one. Dr Barry O’Driscoll had just resigned from World Rugby’s medical advisory board in protest at the pitchside concussion assessment protocol, which gave medics five minutes to diagnose. Dr James Robson, who has taken part in six British and Irish Lion tours, also spoke. So did the renowned neuropathologist Dr. Willie Stewart. At the Daily Mail, journalist Sam Peters has been working on a series of articles exploring these questions. And in Westminster, Chris Bryant, Labor MP for the Rhondda, was also starting to ask questions.
There were others, but not so many who said they did wrong, that it was just scaremongering. Men like the head coach who told me, angrily, that the group was going to kill the sport, or the former player who insisted that they wanted to make the game soft, or the doctor who announced, at one medical conference, that either the risks were being greatly underestimated, or the administrators repeatedly said that the welfare of the players was paramount, and that the sport was simply following science.
For years, rugby’s concussion policy was shaped by the Concussion In Sport Group, which produced an agreement document every four years summarizing the latest research on the issue. Here, between Robinson, Stewart, O’Driscoll and the rest, another consensus began, one that agreed, in O’Driscoll’s words, that the sport had “got this one wrong, very wrong”. That same year, the NFL reached a $765m 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 face similar demands.
He was right. In December 2020, the Guardian broke the news that a group of former professional players were taking legal action against the game’s authorities because they had been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy and, in some cases, early-onset dementia. The first three to go public were England internationals Steve Thompson and Michael Lipman, and Wales international Alix Popham. The Guardian interviewed the three and then, in the following months, many others besides, such as Dan Scarbrough, Paul Pook, Alex Abbey, as well as the Norman Hadley family.
Their pain, their suffering, always seemed to me to be an unquestionable truth. The links between head trauma and CTE have been known for much longer than people sometimes let on, but it is still a complex and controversial science. But when I close my eyes, I can still hear Thompson talking about how he doesn’t remember winning the World Cup, Lipman describing how he struggles to control his bladder at night, Popham at tell me about the time he got off while riding his bike. , and the issues seem very black and white.
268 players are involved in the action. They don’t all have the same diagnoses or the same symptoms, but they all have their own stories.
At the High Court on Friday a judge will decide whether they can go ahead with their group legal order, and, if they can, which test cases will go on to trial. The proceedings are still in the pre-action phase, and there is an opportunity for the disputing parties to reach an early settlement to avoid a trial.
But the defendants are not thought to be inclined to settle at this point. The situation is very different from that of the NFL players, who decided. The allegation was that the authorities misled them deliberately, but the allegation in rugby is that they were negligent in their efforts to quell them.
A key part of the allegations is that World Rugby relied too much 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 fraud. CISG continues, but their credibility has been damaged. They no longer have a monopoly on authority.
That’s 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 accepted as a mainstream position.
The lawsuit, and the McCrory scandal that followed, has accelerated that conversation. This year, in what Robinson felt was a significant achievement, the UK government finally released new Integrated Guidelines for Grassroots Sport, including ideas he had been advocating for the past decade.
It seems the authorities are finally acting with the appropriate urgency. That doesn’t mean they’re getting everything right, far from it, but they’re no longer insisting that nothing is wrong.
They are pinning a lot on instrumented mouth guards, which will help measure the impact on players, and there is also hope for new diagnostic tools on the side of the field, and even experimental treatments. World Rugby says it wants to address the cause as well as the symptoms. That sounds good. But it is difficult to balance the financial needs to play more often with the medical need to give players more rest.
The inescapable truth is that rugby is a collision sport. More can be done to minimize, but not eliminate, the risk of head trauma, particularly the repeated small blows associated with jostling and tackling.
The decision to play the game will be a question 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 players’ parents, will have to ask themselves if the game is worth it. And the answer to that one could be fatal.
