Rugby World Cup 2015, big hits making game too dangerous, warn top surgeons
Rugby World Cup 2015, big hits making game too dangerous, warn top surgeons
First published in the Sydney Morning Herald, October 14 2015
By Daniel Schofield and Richard Bath
Two leading sports surgeons have warned that rugby’s attrition rate is fast becoming unsustainable after statistics showed that the number of players who have had to withdraw from the World Cup through injury has more than doubled.
Already 34 players have been replaced because of injury from the point when the 31-man squads were finalised to the end of the pool stage. At the same point in the 2011 World Cup, there had been 16 withdrawals.
The toll has been particularly heavy on the home nations with the total now at 13 with the withdrawal of Ireland captain Paul O’Connell. At both the 2011 and 2007 World Cup tournaments, they had lost just two players heading into the quarter-finals.
The scale of that brutality was brought sharply into focus in the last round of games. Against Australia, Liam Williams became the 10th back Wales have lost to injury, going back to Jonathan Davies’s ruptured anterior cruciate ligament in May. A day later Ireland’s Peter O’Mahony sustained a knee ligament injury while Jonathan Sexton and O’Connell were substituted in the first half. The latter is likely to have played his last match for Ireland.
It is a sad inevitability there will be many more casualties before the tournament concludes on October 31, particularly now the stakes are that much higher. As enthralling as the spectacles are to watch, there comes a point at which it be must asked when is too much being sacrificed in the name of entertainment.
Professors John Fairclough and Gordon Mackay are both renowned orthopaedic surgeons. Fairclough has a 30-year association with the Welsh Rugby Union and Cardiff RFC while Mackay has also worked extensively with the Scottish Rugby Union. Both are rugby men to the core but are deeply concerned by both the scale and severity of the injury rate in the sport.