Always a Wasp

Intersting similarities in the tables of both leagues at the end of 2023.

Clearly RWC has impacted on both and not many points separate the top 7 or 8 in either competition.

2024 could be fascinating watching in both leagues.

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/dartford/news/huge-rugby-stadium-plans-rivalled-by-2-500-home-garden-city-298835/

Whilst not necessarily disagreeing WWW, I will give him the benefit of the doubt. He did after all pension Ben Youngs off earlier than I expected.
TBH, its not his selection which worries me, he selects a team based on how he wants to play. He needs to change his game plan to a more expansive, risky & entertaining style then pick a team accordingly. If he doesn't he may as well keep picking Sale/Tigers/Sarries players.

He will need to bin Farrell completly before he gets my support. We should be building now for RWC 2027. It would not concern me if we lost all our 6N games for the next two years, if the outcome delivers a squad that has a convincing chance of winning it. He has a lot to learn from SCW.

Did not know who they were until last night. Awesome scrummaging - destroyed the Scarlets. Georgian rugby at it's best.

Interesting (and very sensible) location. Adjacent to the M20/M25 interchange.Not a bad run from HW IF the traffic flows are good!

Elliott Stooke back to Bath from Montpellier.

Ex-stars suing rugby for damage it did to their brains
Former players involved in legal action against the sport?s authorities tell David Walsh about their experiences of concussion in rugby ? and its devastating effects post-retirement

Litigants include three World Cup winners, 14 England internationals, 47 from Wales, four from Ireland and six from Scotland. Thirteen represented the British & Irish Lions.
Players say blows to the head caused dementia, depression and other illnesses.
If successful they would be in line for significant damages with serious financial consequences for the sport.
Many are from the 20-year period after the game turned professional when there was a huge increase in physicality and size.
Litigants include three World Cup winners, 14 England internationals, 47 from Wales, four from Ireland and

Right now Kieran Low is in a forest at Broughton Hall, near Skipton in North Yorkshire. Seven years ago, he left rugby, although it is more accurate to say the game abandoned him. Twenty-five years old, five caps for Scotland, and on the scrapheap because his brain was broken. Two years ago we spoke while he was waiting on results of neurological tests. ?I know what the scans will show,? he said at the time.

Among the things that struck me that afternoon at his flat in Bristol was what he said about his first cap. A second-half replacement in a Friday night game against Australia at Murrayfield ten years ago, he got whacked soon after coming on. Dazed and disorientated he felt he couldn?t go off, then he suffered another concussion near the end. After the game he had a panic attack by the side of the pitch.

?I got to the mountain top and I didn?t want to be there,? he says now. ?It was too harsh. It hurt. What came after was an unravelling into addiction, opioids and alcohol, and me ignoring my mental health. I just kept playing. I kept drinking, abusing pills, partying. I kept getting concussions. Until I didn?t get re-signed.?

? Ex-rugby stars among 294 launching class action over brain injuries
? Rugby head injuries: Ex-players detail trauma and alleged neglect

At seven o?clock in the morning at Broughton Hall last week, he left the Volkswagen Crafter campervan he shares with his girlfriend, Kate. In sandals, swimming trunks and a jacket, he ran two miles to a small lake on the estate. He is here because being outdoors, in a still and beautiful place, he can better deal with the mood swings of a damaged brain.
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At one point near the end of his time in rugby, only the thought of Bridget, his mum, stopped him ending his life. He needed to get away from people and cities and situations his brain couldn?t handle. The journey has been torturous but progressive. Now he eats sensibly, hardly drinks and is finished with opioids. He gives to his brain the love a mother gives to a sick child. In the trees at Broughton Hall, he learns to make platforms using ropes and nets, refuges for those wanting to clear their heads.

?I?m at a point where I?m glad it [brain damage] happened to me,? he says. ?My life now, I love it. I live how I want. I live quite free. I don?t know, I guess some people would think I do weird things but I am building resilience to what happened in the past so that I can have a life I enjoy. For a number of years after rugby I retreated to the cave and learnt some shit. I had to, and that, now, is part of my story.?

He was right about the neurological tests. Low had persistent post-concussion syndrome (PPCS) diagnosed, a condition that occurs when brain injury symptoms persist for a long time. PPCS symptoms include headaches and dizziness, anxiety and depression as well as cognitive impairment that results in forgetfulness and taking longer to work things out. ?On the balance of probabilities,? the report read, ?Mr Low has suffered brain injury from his rugby career.?

He watched little of this autumn?s World Cup in France, no longer having time for the game. His connection to rugby is now told in documents lodged before the High Court. Case No 12, pages 306 to 331. Although he is officially a litigant, he tries not to think about the case.

?I guess it comes down to a simple choice,? Andy Dufresne says to his best friend, Red, in The Shawshank Redemption, ?get busy living or get busy dying?. Low has made his choice. He and Kate will soon be on the road again, pointing their Volkswagen Crafter in goodness knows what direction.
Neil Spence
Flanker, 47

Scanning the 294 players suing the game?s governing bodies, it is natural to pause at the well known. Some like Steve Thompson and Alix Popham have told their stories and spoken of their involvement in the legal action. For multiple reasons many prefer to remain anonymous. For some, it is fear of how rugby friends might react, others are in jobs that could be compromised by an admission of brain damage.

The list is packed with familiar names. Two Welsh forwards with more than 130 caps between them, a former England international with more than 65, and Carl Hayman who wore the All Blacks shirt 46 times. If you look through the list of Welsh players from a not-too-distant era, all you can do is shake your head.

Yet the majority were amateurs, semi-professionals and club professionals. Many played for modest wages while incurring the same damage as their high-profile colleagues.
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Had you been in Cullingworth, a village close to Bradford, last week, you might have seen a fit-looking man in his late forties walking to Parkside secondary school, where he teaches. It is hard to tell from how he looks that Neil Spence was once a rugby player. Impossible to know as he walks along that what happened on the pitch changed his life.

After learning the game at Hymers College in Hull, he started his professional career with the Leicester Tigers academy. An open-side flanker, he had played for England Under-18, Colts and Under-21. The memory of his first training session at Leicester would stay with him.

?The first team would actually play the second team on the Thursday night, this was just before rugby went professional,? he says. ?Because I?m competitive I wanted to prove myself, so I was jackling over a ball, someone didn?t like it, tried clearing me but I was competitive. Then an older player said, ?What are you doing, you don?t do that, you?re a new kid, you shouldn?t do that.?

?I said, ?No, I want to show myself. I want to be playing first team.?

?He said, ?Well, do it again, you?re going to get smacked.?

?I did it again and I got smacked. They had to send me inside for stitches. It shows how brutal and how competitive it was. I had probably just turned 18. I?m not going to name the guy because I now know him well.?

After two years he moved to Gloucester and then went wherever he could to get a contract. Rotherham Titans, Saint-Nazaire in France, Bradford Bingley, Harrogate, Hull, Otley before washing up at what would be his last club, Ilkley. He was the journeyman?s journeyman.
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In a consultation with neurologists, Spence recalled eight separate concussions, three of which involved loss of consciousness. The third concussion he lists happened during an England Colts match against Italy and he recalled being in a bar afterwards and trying to listen to what his mother was saying but was dazed and confused. He picked up what his mum said to his father, ?Look Mike, he?s got brain damage already. He can?t understand what we?re saying.?

Sometimes he was taken off after a concussion, mostly he played on. No one talked about the potential for long-term damage and he never saw the danger. ?No, not really, because I didn?t get knocked out cold all the time,? he says. ?It was more the sub-concussions where I struggled. You get a bang to the head, you feel dizzy, you sort of dip out of the game or the training session for a bit, compose yourself, go quiet for five or ten minutes, don?t carry the ball, don?t get involved in that much, just recover as much as you possibly can and then go back into the game. ?For me it?s the silent head impacts that are the killer. If you are knocked out cold, people can see it, ?Right, OK, he?s concussed, he?s knocked out, shouldn?t be on the pitch,? but the amount of times you?ve made a tackle or been tackled, and you think, ?Blooming heck, where am I?? You?re seeing stars, your head?s fuzzy, you?re very disorientated. It got to the point that if at the end of the game I didn?t have a ?fuzzy? head, I thought I hadn?t done enough.?

He and his partner Sarah married in 2005. As the years progressed she saw changes. Neil would occasionally be short-tempered and impatient with their kids. Other times he just ?disappeared to the bedroom or went for a drive without saying where he was going. Once, when employed as an RFU development officer, he went to collect their kids, Zac and Millie, from the nursery but instead went to a different school and began to set up for a coaching session that had not been scheduled.

Then, there was the constant need to sleep. After the RFU, he got a teaching job at Parkside school. Each evening he got home a little after 4pm and slept for two hours on the couch. The kids wondered why dad was always sleeping. A neurologist explained that because some parts of his brain were damaged, other parts were being overstretched. Hence the tiredness.

?I?ve split from Sarah now,? he says. ?We?d been together for 19 years. She believes we would still be together if it weren?t for the problems with my head. She thinks it?s changed me completely. Which is hard, because I don?t necessarily see that. She didn?t want me to move out. Whatever is going in my head, I was thinking, ?This is the thing I need to do?. I felt I?d become a bit of a burden on Sarah, my stepson Jake, and our two younger ones.?

?I still love the game, for what it has given me. Rugby has values and I hold those values dear ? but if I knew that it was going to turn out the way it has, would I have still played? Sadly, the answer is no.?

He knows the bottom line. It was written in the neurologist?s report. ?In my opinion, on balance, Mr Spence has developed long-term brain injury complication from rugby. This is, on the balance of probabilities, a form of early onset neurodegeneration, and is most likely to be CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy].?
Ben Pegna
Flanker, 47


Two hundred and ninety-four rugby union players? Can it be so many? Especially as this number is drawn mostly from two countries, England and Wales? It is even possible that this group does not accurately reflect the true extent of the problem. There are high-profile former players known to be suffering from symptoms associated with brain injury (forgetfulness, increased irritability, noise intolerance, migraines, confusion) who cannot bring themselves to accuse the game they love. There are others who just slipped through the net.

Ben Pegna played for 20 years, from age 11 to 31. When he could no longer play, he coached. He remembers a talented young prop at Wasps who had played for England at different age levels. What he really recalls though were the effects of the head impacts suffered by the prop.

After a bang to the head he would disappear for a week, the migraine compelling him to lie in a quiet and darkened room. He would eventually return to training and be fine until the next collision and then he was gone again to tend to his injured brain. Eventually the young prop just gave the game away. Someone told Pegna that he had gone to live in the countryside, far from noise and rugby, and was now in the Cotswolds.

Pegna?s own career lasted ten years. The game had just turned professional, he was a not very big flanker and to survive in the professional game he had to be strong at the breakdown. That meant positioning his body over the ball, taking the hits of opponents determined to remove him and, basically, suffering the consequences. There were lots of concussions. When first asked he couldn?t remember, but looking in the mirror seeing the old scars, he could trace each one back to the day it happened. His case lists nine separate concussions. He had early onset dementia and probable CTE diagnosed.

He tells a story about playing for Caerphilly during his time at Cardiff University. A midweek game at either Abertillery or Ebbw Vale in which he suffered a bad blow to his cheekbone and nose. He recalls being encouraged to play on and thinks that may have been because Caerphilly were low on numbers. After the match his eye, nose and cheekbone were swollen and sore. In the shower, he tried to blow his nose and air whistled through a wound near his eye socket.

Feeling dizzy, he collapsed. He spoke to the club medic and that night his team-mate Dai Duly drove him to the Cardiff Royal Infirmary. From there he went home, took painkillers and returned to training two days later. When he told the coach that his head still ached, he was advised to do an indoor fitness session.

Back then no one spoke of concussion or post-concussion symptoms. No one asked if the headaches had stopped. And if a player was stood down for the then mandatory 21 days after a concussion, he returned to play without much consideration of whether he had actually made a full recovery. Pegna says he suffered from headaches all through his career and was told they were probably caused by dehydration.

After his career ended, the symptoms worsened. ?There have been times in the car with the kids where, if I?m honest, I?ve exploded,? he says. ?All it needs is for one of the kids to ask a question while the other is turning up the radio and I just can?t cope with that. I?m trying to control this as best I can, and have had to have chats with the kids about it. Even now I get emotional talking about it, but this is also part of it, getting emotional to the point of being in tears. What I feel after an explosion is guilt, because I?m taking stuff out on the kids and that?s not right. What makes it hard for me is that I?m immediately aware of what I?ve done and it?s like, ?Where did that come from?? Then it?s just shame.?

Daniel, his nine-year-old, plays rugby. Recently he was due to start contact. Pegna went to the club in west London, spoke to the coaches who tried to reassure him but the stuff that has been happening inside his head for more than 20 years offered conflicting advice. The old flanker ?listened to the inner voice. Daniel has given up rugby.
Tom Rock
Full back, 39

Since getting his diagnosis of early onset dementia and probable CTE, Tom Rock and his wife Joni have had conversations about the future. The science says his neurodegenerative condition is progressive and irreversible. The detail of the neurological report related to him makes a point that is true for all rugby players with his diagnosis: life expectancy is reduced. If he hadn?t incurred brain damage, Rock?s life expectancy would be 80 years. Damaged, his life is now predicted to be 13 years shorter. Anyone finding this detail on their medical report will quickly figure that it?s not just the lessening of their years but also the potential for catastrophic loss in their quality of life. Hence the conversations in the Rock home at Bangor in Northern Ireland.

?It involves every element of your life,? Tom says. ?Do I save and invest in a pension, because obviously you want to look after your kids? Or do I want to maximise my time with them because who knows what I?m going to be like in five or ten years? We?re probably looking to holiday more now, I am certainly of a mind that we have to enjoy our time together now. If this didn?t exist, I?d be thinking how do I make sure the kids are going to be financially sound when I?m not around in 50 years or whatever. This is what I mean when saying it affects every facet of your life.?

Rock had one of those careers, not quite top level but enough to satisfy his thirst for serious rugby ? he played for England Under-19 and for Leeds in the Premiership, before going on to play for English clubs in the lower leagues ? and to allow him to earn some kind of living from the game. It is noted in his medical report that he played ?28 years of organised rugby?.

In the development of neurological conditions, load is a key factor. Rock worries about this while remembering how much he loved the game, still loves it. ?I?m not averse to the litigation that is going on. I am part of it, but I am still passionate about the game, still feel conflicted. But at the time when I didn?t know what was going on, when I was paying to see a counsellor privately on a weekly basis, I began speaking to Richard [Boardman, lawyer for the injured players] because it was the only way I could actually find what was going on with my health.?

His experiences during his career were typical. He recalls a Leeds Carnegie team run before the first game of the 2007-2008 season in which he suffered a concussion and laceration to an eye. As happened in situations around this time, the external wound was stitched and the internal one ignored. Another that has stayed in his mind was a concussion he received playing for Durham in the County Championship. He fell into a ruck, staggered about for a few minutes, then regained his equilibrium and never left the field. A week later he was back on the pitch, getting hit in an early tackle and losing consciousness. He came round and carried on. His recollection is that on both occasions he received no medical attention. It was a dangerous game of play now and pay later.

?I wouldn?t say I?m as bad as some of the guys. I?m 39, I was 37 when I got my diagnosis, so I am probably at the younger end of the spectrum. It impacts me in my work, both in terms of recollection of information and the emotional and mental health side of it. I try to be a prolific reader but during the bad times I struggle to go from the top of the page to the bottom.

?I often lose track of my train of thought in conversations and am terrible with names. People say, this happens to everyone. Not at 39. During the last three years, I was having difficulties with my mood and anxiety, and as much as this is difficult to say, there was a lot of suicidal thinking. I never acted on that but it was fairly ever-present over that period. I think this is quite present with a lot of lads.?

Rock is conflicted about the litigation because rugby gave him so much. His dad played, he had 28 years of participation, he met his wife at the Stockholm Sevens, most of his friendships were born in rugby and most of the positive things in his life came from the game. Still he was relieved when his daughter Ella tried and then said she didn?t like rugby. ?I?ve got a seven-year-old lad, Matthew, who is due to start contact next year, and he is keen. What do you do? It is a real concern.?

The greater worry, though, is clear to him. ?I can cope with not remembering stuff, I look at the family business, my close family are aware of where I?m at. If I am shit at work, I?m shit at work. But if I ruin my relationship with my kids because I?m flying off the handle, that would be so hard.?

There two articles in the ST on the issue.

I will C&Pboth later.