Rugby will always be about physical contact – you can’t make it safe

A final day of spellbinding drama will be the lingering memory but even Ireland's eventual success can't erase how that last day was an aberration in a Six Nations Championship of mostly rutting muscularity.

Once the elation fades, it won’t take long to recall how the overwhelming theme for the previous month was fretting about the bloodied and the bowed, the crocked and the concussed, with a perpetual cry for “something to be done” in order to stop rugby turning into mere attrition.

Last impressions can last though – especially when you want them to.

One spring gambol has made everything right in the world again, with another outcome being that annoyingly vague “something” search can thankfully be parked to the side: tangible answers to rugby’s health issues are a bugger to find, for the simple reason there aren’t any.

Just as it is inevitable that modern rugby’s attritonal reality will resume normal service, and bulked-up players clattering into each other will continue to get hurt, it is also inevitable that any token fiddling with the rules in order to find a “something” to ease concerns will only result in fiddly outcomes.

Recent South African research on players wearing extra equipment for instance acknowledged that while headgear and mouth guards reduce minor injuries, they have little or no impact in terms of concussion which is basically what much of the health fuss is about.

There also appears to be consensus that plating players like mini-T-34’s actually makes them even more reckless, something that sounds dubious but which makes more sense when you consider rugby is statistically a less dangerous game than American football.

De-bulking the players

Reducing the numbers on each team, or widening pitches into pampas, might create a little more space initially, but lots of thought would simply be put into reducing it again.

And when you think about it, any ideas about de-bulking the players is fundamentally regressive, a negative gesture against bigger-better-faster-stronger aspiration. That cheats aspire in defiance of the rules hardly invalidates the basic evolutionary instinct.

Anyway, taking the “physicality” out of rugby is like taking hurleys off hurlers: what would be the point of the whole thing? The whole point of rugby is physical contact. You can’t make it safe.

Not that this is normally something that keeps a lot of us awake at night: in a world where so much arbitrary awfulness can happen to the innocent, any hand-wringing for those paid to play a game, and who voluntarily embrace its dangers, has to be kept in context.

Aspiration, though, is fundamental to any sport: the idea, no matter how vague, that elite participation is open to all. And in the midst of national celebration, any instinctive off-hand detachment from rugby's innate physicality problem got thrown out of whack this weekend when a Helen Lovejoy spanner got thrown in this direction – "So, would you let your kids play rugby?"

And that really is something, because, hand on heart, my insides would dissolve if they wanted to play the game.

Not for any aesthetic reasons, although some of the rugby culture in Ireland is an offence to good taste, much of it continuing to be based on a schools system which doesn't so much encourage knobend-ism as incubate, suckle and wean.

But still, more elite success for the national team means rugby’s tentacles are reaching ever further into the general public consciousness, putting the “would you” question in front of ever more parents. Everyone’s call is their own, and inevitably such calls are a consequence of everyone’s own prejudices and background. But I’m guessing I’m far from alone in being appalled at the idea of the heirs to the overdraft being stuck in a scrum.

Lethargic youth

Even realising that proclaiming “thou shalt not” is the surest way to increase something’s appeal, there’s a dead and horribly mutilated body they’ll have to step over first before getting to any lineout.

This is said as someone whose own lethargic youth was shaped by hurleys bent around a non-helmeted cranium on a number of starry-eyed occasions. The idea of the same happening to my kids actually warms the cockles. The idea of them getting into a boxing ring doesn’t worry me either. If they can wrangle their way on to a horse, then more power to them.

These aren’t activities without dangers. But they’re different from rugby, for any number of hopelessly prejudiced reasons which actually pale next to the real one – a desperate and random vulnerability to getting hurt.

It’s taken as read in most sports that the lower the standard the greater the danger. But getting badly clattered on a football or GAA field is usually accidental. The aim isn’t to clatter. It is in boxing, but that’s one on one, with a consequent control over one’s own destiny. Wriggle any amount you like on the back of one twinkle-toed weekend but rugby is about clattering.

It basically tells 30 young fellas – and it’s still mostly young fellas – to pile in on top of each other in situations where personal skill or control is either redundant or compromised. There’s no getting away from that. It’s intrinsic to the game, no matter what the grade.

Even operating at the highest level doesn’t prevent head trauma, or the dangers of thuggery, no matter how cod-martial bull is employed to legitimise it. And it actively encourages an overwhelming emphasis on “physicality” that one freewheeling day isn’t going to make redundant. Play rugby and that’s the deal you make.

It’s delusional to think any magic wand “something” can alter that. But the “would you” question is becoming a lot more relevant to a lot more people. So, would you?