One of the less enjoyable aspects of growing old is the aches and pains, often caused by injuries suffered during my less than stellar sporting life. I’ve had a bad back for over 40 years thanks to cracking a couple of vertebrae and ripping muscles and tendons during a football match. One of my ankles clicks embarrassingly loudly, after breaking it over 20 years, not realising it was broken and allowing it to reset at the wrong angle. Then there are my fingers, chipped and bent by cricket balls and my right hand, arthritic thanks to a Bennett’s Fracture Dislocation when playing football nearly three decades ago. Even my knees are playing up now, possibly in sympathy at the rest of me. But following the media in recent weeks, months and years, I am grateful that at least one part of my body is relatively intact: my head in general and my brain in particular.
The Football Association has announced a trial to ban players heading the ball in Under 12s football. This in reaction to the mounting evidence suggesting that regular heading a football can cause brain damage leading to dementia and Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Numerous football and rugby players have recently been diagnosed with dementia and probable CTE (currently, a diagnosis can only be confirmed after a post mortem) and it’s scary as hell.
I watched a bit of rugby union at the weekend and seeing players trying to ‘punch holes’ through the opposing defence with their heads still makes me wince. England were already missing some players due to concussion protocols and lost at least one more due to a head injury. Some players have been concussed dozens of times, maybe much more often than that, and the brain does not recover in the same way as other parts of the body. Sometimes it doesn’t recover at all.
When I started watching football at my local park, players used a thick leather ball, with laces holding it together. It weighed a ton. Big strong players headed the ball repeatedly, seemingly without a reaction, but when us kids went on the pitch to muck about at half time, if we could kick the ball high enough to head it, I remember seeing stars after doing so. It was not something I looked to repeat, although we had no idea it might cause brain damage. But now, I recall some of the men who played and some died of dementia, some massively big strong men. Was it heading that ball?
I rarely headed the ball when I played because happily I was so bad at it. And because I remember the numbing effects of having done so as a child. But even though the balls today are so much lighter, watch your average game and players head the ball on numerous occasions. Will today’s players end up the way of so many from the past?
I was far too much of a coward to play rugby union. We could all see the missing teeth and black eyes, but we didn’t know what happened inside the head. But thanks to people like Steve Thompson and Ryan Jones, we do now. I avoided all contact on the few occasions I played at school. I was fortunate to be so crap at the sport.
Being hit on the head is not good for you. With boxing, the actual aim of the sport is to render the opponent unconscious with the majority of punches being aimed at the head. Show me an old pro and I’ll likely show you a brain damaged fighter. In rugby union, when a player shows a sign of concussion, he is withdrawn from play. In boxing, he is sent out to fight again. That makes boxing even worse than rugby union for brain injury but here we are talking about which sport is more dangerous, not which is the safest. I suspect if I’d ever boxed, I wouldn’t be writing this blog.
We’re not going to ban football and rugby and even though we should really think about it we’re not going to ban boxing either. I doubt that we can make boxing safer but with the other two, maybe we can. The main areas are heading the ball in football and the incessant collisions in rugby union. Football is beginning to look at the former and the large number of legal challenges may encourage the rugby union authorities to wake up to what appears to be a terrible problem.
My aches and pains are frustrating and slightly debilitating but many of my marbles are still intact. And I was probably lucky because I was seeing stars from heading the ball as a kid. It taught me a lesson, even though I didn’t know at the time what the consequences might be.
