The NRL keeps playing fast and loose with head injuries
PLUS: Kane Williamson cap giveaway, a guest contributor to Midweek Book Club and more Ashes sniping.
One of the more troubling aspects in the wash-up of the NRL season is the continuing game of Russian roulette league plays with head injuries.
In the first minutes of the grand final South Sydney centre Dane Gagai copped a hip to the head, had the wobbles and was taken off for a Head Injury Assessment. Somehow he returned to the fray minutes later (and actually played pretty well).
He was not the only one to appear dazed after taking hits to the head in what is always a brutal, full frontal sporting occasion.
Because it is a grand final, perhaps all the rules go out the window, but if that attitude even mildly troubles you, what happened the week before should send a chill down your spine.
The Storm’s cult-hero Kiwis hooker Brandon Smith was forced out of the semifinal against Penrith after failing his HIA. Less than 24 hours later he was filmed in a compromising Mad Monday position with a mysterious blonde powder.
Melbourne Storm responded by levying heavy sanctions on Smith and his teammates Cameron Munster and Chris Lewis but the Storm CEO offered some mitigation.
“Yeah, I believe they were incredibly intoxicated,” Rodski said*.
As it pertains to Smith, there are three options here and none of them are good.
One, duty of care to concussed players does not exist beyond the stadium.
Two, duty of care to concussed players does exist but it is far too easy to circumvent.
Three, Smith was never really concussed but it was used as a tactic to access the 18th player.
It is well past time for the NRL as a collective - executive, coaches, players, broadcasters and even its most unapologetic of fans - to stop playing fast and loose with head injuries.
* Incidentally, one of the arguments used by those who try to downplay the link between contact sports and long-term cognitive decline, including dementia conditions such as CTE, is that players in the past were more at risk because of the kind of heavy drinking associated with sport that just doesn’t happen now - plus ça change.
STEADY THE SHIP GIVEAWAY!
To celebrate The Bounce’s first month, I’ve got a cracking giveaway for subscribers.
I have a signed Kane Williamson ODI playing cap with his Black Caps number - 161 - embroidered on the side. It even comes with genuine lint, presumably from Williamson’s kit bag though it is yet to be forensically tested.
To enter, all you have to do is be a paying subscriber and follow @dylancleaver3 on Instagram, like the post and tag one friend you think might be interested in either the cap or The Bounce (or both!).
Entries close on October 28 and the winner will be announced October 29.
Thanks again for your support and please keep sharing. It is the best way to get the word out there.
Nasser returns Aussie serve
In Monday’s post, I made mention of the Ashes baiting that has become more and more tedious down through the years. This year it comes with a little more edge with the series still in doubt because of several England players’ reluctance to commit to such a long tour without the ability to have families with them.
This stance has been mocked in some quarters, mainly the antipodean quarter, but Nasser Hussain has hit back at what he sees as Australian hypocrisy. It’s not a flawless argument and even he has to qualify some of the praise he hands out to England’s cricketers but even if you can’t be blowed clicking on the link and reading it in his entirety, his run down of which countries have committed to test cricket during the pandemic makes for interesting reading.
England: 18 tests (12 home, 6 away)
India: 13 (4 home, 9 away)
Pakistan: 11 (2 home, 9 away)
West Indies: 10 (6 home, 4 away)
Sri Lanka: 8 (4 home, 4 away)
New Zealand: 7 (4 home, 3 away)
South Africa: 6 (2 home, 4 away)
Bangladesh: 5 (2 home, 3 away)
Zimbabwe: 5 (3 home, 2 away)
Australia: 4 (4 home, 0 away)
Afghanistan: 2 (1 home, 1 away)
While some of this is down to circumstance, there are a couple of notable points: Australia are not in a position to pass judgement on how other countries should deal with life in a bio-bubble away from home; you can sympathise as to why Pakistanis feel so let down by the international cricket community.
MIDWEEK BOOK CLUB
What is it?
The Commonwealth of Cricket: A Lifelong Love Affair with the Most Subtle and Sophisticated Game Known to Humankind
Who wrote it?
Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: William Collins
Genre: Memoir
Reviewer: Jeremy Rees
One of the conceits of cricket is that it has spawned books by the finest writers in sport by far. Perhaps it is the length of the game which gives writers a chance to study the character of players. Or maybe the mental dimension of cricket appeals to writers. Or its frustrations – all that time and rain and draws. Or maybe because the game has been so bound up with the social history of England and then the social fabric of its former colonies.
For whatever reason, cricket does have writers who go well beyond the quick “as told to” sports biographies, though there are still plenty of those. There are writers like Emma John whose memoir Following On about supporting the English cricket team at their worst is a delight. Or Australians Gideon Haigh or Jock Serong, one of only a handful of novelists who managed to write a fine thriller around cricket, The Rules of Backyard Cricket. The shift in cricketing power and riches to Asia has seen more fine writing on the game in the subcontinent and beyond. Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones: A History of Pakistan Cricket is one gem; in turns funny, insightful and dramatic, and tries to answer the question how one nation’s team could be magical one day and awful the next. Another gem was Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field'' subtitled “The Indian history of a British Sport”, which charted how the English game became the game of India. It was a rival to what is long considered cricket’s greatest book, CLR James’ memoir and essays, Beyond a Boundary, on the Caribbean, colonialism and cricket.
Now, 20 years after Foreign Field, Guha returned with a cricket memoir, a fan’s view of cricket, The Commonwealth of Cricket, with the extended subtitle of “A lifelong love affair with the most subtle and sophisticated game known to humankind”. A public intellectual in India and author of histories of Gandhi, Guha writes of his long years as a dedicated fan, what Australians might call a “cricket nuffy” or the rest of us a “cricket tragic”. He organises lectures or conference attendances to coincide with India playing; he cannot walk past a match without seeing who is up. A courtly man, he follows every lead to meet the great and good of cricket. At one point he constructs his “India XI of players with whom I have shaken hands”. It is a who’s who of India’s finest.
Guha was taught to play and love the game by his uncle Durai, a good local hockey and cricket player. He becomes a reasonable schoolboy cricketer, a lifelong member of the Friends Union Cricket Club (Bangalore), a dedicated follower of the Karnataka provincial team, an avid watcher of India and a fan of the greatest players wherever they may be from. As a Hindu, he says, he is used to having a pantheon of gods to follow.
He deplores the growing nationalism of the game, where fans hungrily watch only their team’s success, or Indian cricket authorities promote Indian cricket only to the detriment of the global game.
When he meets a Pakistani fellow fan on a train, he concocts an even-handed best XI of modern Indian and Pakistan players, despite the tensions whenever the two sides meet – he selects six Indians, five Pakistanis and gives the captaincy to Pakistan.
He is alive to the snobbery of the cricket world and calls out the condescension that was once handed down to Indian and New Zealand teams and is now handed to Bangladesh.
The result is what appears to be a gentle ramble through the byways of Indian and world cricket. Here is a pen portrait of Sachin Tendulkar; there, a conversation with spinner Bishan Bedi. He writes of watching provincial matches with a few others in the stand or having coffee with boyhood cricket heroes.
Guha writes, as always, elegantly and gently, so the first half of the book feels like a cluttered portrait of the brain of a cricket fan, all strokes and style and scores and, shining through, a love of the game. Then the book changes, like a meandering test match suddenly brought to life by a single decision.
In 2017, the Supreme Court of India dismissed the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India on suspicion of corruption, cronyism, and nepotism. Guha is asked to join a Committee of Administrators to help run Indian cricket and sort out the mess.
A friend warns against it, saying his romance with cricket will never survive a brush with the venality of players and administrators, the mal-administration of Indian cricket and up-close views of some cricket superstars. Guha does not listen, perhaps he should have. He lasts just a few months. He is shocked at the lack of money to grassroots cricket; the double dipping and huge sums paid to India’s cricket superstars; the inordinate power of the Indian Premier League.
Written several years afterwards, the book is revealed at the end as something different than it had seemed at first. It is not a genial ramble through cricket, but a gentle plea to hold fast to cricket’s old strengths. To keep supporting children who want to play school or club cricket, not starve the grassroots of money to pay superstars in the flash bash cash game of IPL T20. To put the game above nationalistic slogans (the opening quote is by Jack Fingleton, Don Bradman’s contemporary, “the longer I live, I am pleased to say, the less nationalistic I become. The outcome of a match is interesting but not, on the scales of time, of any great moment”.) Even the structure of the book – school cricket, club, provincial, test and then international stars – is a challenge to the modern game, largely ignoring IPL and T20.
In the end, he returns to Uncle Durai, now 83. He is still coaching a club team, still telling boys who dream of playing for India that they should get a good job first- “there’s 0.00001 percent chance of becoming a test player” - and still in love with the game. Durai is now an ardent Modi supporter. Guha, the Gandhian, and he can’t talk politics.
But they can still talk cricket.
THE BYC RETURNS
After a brief hiatus brought about by the cancelled tour to Pakistan and general laziness, Paul Ford, myself and Jason Hoyte will return with a podcast right here next week (probably).
