Head On
Moving Forward with Concussion
Axel Bailey
Concussion has become the biggest issue in the early stages of the NRL and AFL seasons, with legal action being taken by former players seeking compensation for pain, suffering, financial loss, and medical expenses due to head injuries sustained during their careers. More than 60 former AFL players have filed a class action lawsuit in the Victorian supreme court, seeking up to two million dollars each. The same day, the AFL released new guidelines for concussion management and a four-year strategy, which includes a 10-year twenty-five million dollar study into the long-term effects of head injury on players.
Lawyers representing a second group of footballers affected by head injury have also vowed to file papers for a lawsuit this week, with the affected cohort including the former Melbourne player Shaun Smith, former Crows star Darren Jarman, and the wife of late Richmond player Shane Tuck. This second case has been eight years in the making, with Greg Griffin, managing partner at Griffin Lawyers, estimating hundreds of players could join the case.
Meanwhile, there has been a tussle between the NRL and its clubs when it comes to taking responsibility for concussion-affected players. Last week, the Dolphins coach, Wayne Bennett, and Canberra Raiders coach, Ricky Stuart, both criticised the NRL’s independent concussion-spotting doctors, who have been in place since last year. Canterbury-Bankstown’s general manager of football, Phil Gould, called the independent doctors “the greatest abomination perpetrated on our game in history”. On Wednesday, the NRL announced its previously more club-based discretionary concussion stand-down process would be replaced by a mandatory 11 days off-field for players who have been diagnosed with what they are calling “category one” concussion.
The Australian Sports Brain Bank has revealed that high-profile former players, including Polly Farmer, Danny Frawley, and Shane Tuck, had been posthumously found to have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head trauma, which has been increasingly linked to contact sports. The Concussion in Sport Group (CISG) statements on which all these codes rely heavily for their concussion policies are controversial among the scientific community as they have so far denied a cause-and-effect relationship between contact sports and CTE, even as the scientific evidence for precisely this keeps growing.
The pressure to be more conservative is having at least some effect, as all of this is occurring in the midst of a senate committee inquiry into concussion and repeated head trauma in contact sports. The inquiry was called after the AFL apologised to players who had been part of a previous, huge and supposedly “ground-breaking”, study about concussion that resulted in no published research and “confusion” about what happened to tests performed on players. The review that led to that apology was itself a consequence of pressure from Guardian Australia for the AFL to account for the work of its former concussion adviser, Dr Paul McCrory, whose academic and scientific publishing record has been blackened by numerous allegations of plagiarism.
The question of liability is at the centre of all of this, and how much the codes can or will be held to account for the ongoing health of players, particularly those whose serious conditions only become apparent after their playing careers are over. While concussion is a dangerous condition that can have serious and ongoing consequences, the still-unaddressed problem is sub concussive blows: that is, all the bumps and thumps and crash-tackles that happen in the course of playing collision sport, that don’t result in concussion symptoms but can cause microscopic damage to the brain.
When it comes to concussion and long-term brain damage, Australia’s biggest sporting bodies are trying to thread a very fine needle. How successful, and how accountable, they will be remains to be seen.