RUGBY LEAGUE has a history of rule changes.
Some of them are major ones right from the earliest years, such as abolishing lineouts in 1897, which first distinguished the new form of rugby from its older cousin, while some are relatively minor and are forgotten about quickly, such as the decision to ban someone playing the ball forward with his head.
And if you are wondering whether that has ever happened, apparently it was legal for the first 95 years of rugby league’s separate history, but no one had ever thought of using the head to deliberately knock the ball forward.
That is until the late Mike McClennan was coaching St Helens and John Harrison was playing for them at prop forward.
McClennan was known as a deep thinker and an innovative coach. And he couldn’t have got much more innovative than when he oversaw Saints in a match against Sheffield Eagles in 1990, when Harrison took the ball at dummy-half and headed it over the Sheffield line for it to be touched down for a try by George Mann.
For some reason the RFL, instead of celebrating the new way of scoring a try, persuaded the international governing body to outlaw the header soon afterwards and the game carried on much as previously, before other teams had the chance to copy and build on what Harrison had done.
Was that a missed opportunity for coaches to introduce greater variety into their teams’ attacking play near their opponents’ line? Unfortunately we’ll never know.
Now we have a new rule that tackles must be made below the armpits of the player carrying the ball. It will be introduced into the professional open-age game in 2025, but a year earlier than that at community level and for the Academy and Scholarship competitions.
Will this be a major change or a minor one?
In the short term it is likely to lead to an increase in yellow or red cards, particularly when combined with the crackdown on any contact to the head, which will result in dismissal and a grade D suspension of two matches or more.
But in the longer term, the RFL is hoping that it will lead to fewer concussions and therefore greater safety for players.
It hopes there will be a reduction in the threat of former players taking legal action against the RFL for compensation for the brain injuries they have suffered, but which have only become apparent later in their lives.
The problem for anyone bringing a case against the RFL is the difficulty of proving that dementia later in life was actually caused by what happened on a rugby league field many years earlier.
At the time of writing, the RFL claims to have heard from lawyers representing some former players, but without any evidence having been put forward that their state of health was caused by injuries sustained on the field.
After all, plenty of people who have never suffered head trauma in their earlier lives seem to suffer from dementia as they grow older. Who can say with any authority why some people suffer that terrible condition, while others don’t?
And even if a former player could prove conclusively that his condition is caused by events on the field, he would then have to prove that the RFL had owed him a duty of care when he was a player and that it had been negligent in failing to exercise that duty.
I am not a lawyer and I’m not sure how anyone would attempt to prove that the RFL was negligent in its past actions. For example, high tackles have always been penalised, with players being shown a red card in the worst cases and being suspended for dangerous tackles. And historically the RFL could only act with the knowledge it had at the time, rather than with the knowledge we have today, which of course is why the RFL is taking action now.
And if the new rule persuades more families to allow their kids to play rugby league because the game looks safer, then that will be a real positive outcome for our sport.
Only time will tell whether the new rule achieves its objective.
It’s interesting to reflect on the fact that most rule changes throughout rugby league’s history have been designed to make the game more appealing for spectators, rather than safer for its players.
But there have been rule changes that have made the game safer for players, even when at the same time making it more appealing for spectators.
The most obvious one that springs to mind is the introduction of substitutes from the 1960s onwards. I suspect the reason for their introduction was to eliminate matches that became one-sided because one team had to lose an injured player. But the ability to leave the field when injured was certainly a positive factor in making the game safer.
Two other rule changes that were based on making the game safer occurred in 2001 and 2009.
In the first instance, it was made illegal to tackle a defending player in the air when he was catching a ball from an opponent’s kick.
In 2009, a player was penalised when he tackled a player who had just kicked the ball while the kicker was still in the air.
So the game has become safer in some respects over the years, although I suspect that the collisions in the modern game have much greater impact than in the old days.
And the reason for that isn’t hard to identify.
I recently watched the 1966 Challenge Cup Final and it was interesting to note that the collisions were nothing like as forceful as they are today, because in those days the defending line was only three yards back.
For how much longer will we see the ten-metre defensive line?
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 492 (January 2024)
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