Rugby is heading back to its roots and embracing physicality

This year’s Six Nations began against a backdrop of foreboding, with 295 players suing rugby’s governing bodies over symptoms of brain injury. But it has ended on a note of unmistakable defiance, dwelling less on class-action lawsuits than on the crunching collisions that had become so impolitic to mention.

While England’s forwards line up to praise George Martin’s monstrous tackling, their social media team release a video montage of Ben Earl’s finest carries. Wherever you look, from the plaudits for Bundee Aki’s flattening of Kyle Steyn to France’s quest for a pack that genuinely weighs a ton, this is a game re-embracing its essence.

Once, it was Australia’s National Rugby League that fetishised its biggest hits. A compilation of its top 100 bone-rattling tackles is full of commentators exclaiming “Get that into ya” or “Strewth, he has got a family”. They have seldom been shy of savagery Down Under: when an all-out brawl erupted in a 1995 State of Origin match, pundits reacted not in horror but by praising the quality of the punches. The Six Nations is another competition fast losing its squeamishness. How else to explain the surge in popularity of Martin, for example? Here is somebody who, the story goes, reacted to his first England call-up last year by asking head coach Steve Borthwick: “Right, boss, who do you want me to fold?”

Until recent weeks, any talk of folding opponents felt discordant, perhaps even distasteful. After all, the sport continues to grapple with the horror of former players succumbing to early onset dementia. Steve Thompson, England’s World Cup-winning hooker in 2003, is just 45 and cannot remember his marriage. Alix Popham, one year his junior and a back-rower with 33 caps for Wales, has had his brain likened by a specialist to a camera with no film in it. These harrowing stories all feed the characterisation of a sport in existential peril. But there are signs rugby is leaning towards a different conclusion, regarding its inherent physical extremes less as fatal flaws than as the very qualities that set it apart.

Martin, who at 22 is already a 6ft 6in, 19st colossus, applies a simple credo to his craft. “The physicality of the sport is the best part,” he said ahead of England’s restorative win over Ireland. “They’re the games, the proper Test matches where it’s so physical – it’s just all man against man. It’s class.” Was this purely the naivete of youth talking? There are enough testimonies by now to suggest that the most juddering impacts are moments to be feared, not celebrated. Carl Hayman, the ex-All Black tighthead prop diagnosed with dementia at 43, has compared playing rugby to being involved in a car crash every week.

And yet with Martin, you have a young man who, not to put too fine a point on it, is expressing how much he loves smashing people. It is an illustration of the deep internal conflict in rugby, between retired players who blame the game for not warning them of brain damage and those who believe that the worst consequences fall within the bounds of acceptable risk. Mike Tindall, a team-mate of Thompson’s and a fearsome tackler in his prime, has left little doubt where he stands, telling Telegraph Sport: “There are going to be hard knocks. That’s why we play Test matches – it’s a test of your body, your mind, your soul, and that’s what people love to see. I think we have got to embrace what we are.”

This view finds many adherents, not least Courtney Lawes, the type of uncompromising figure on whom Martin could be modelled. For all his gigantic hits, Lawes usually found a way to keep them legal. He was loved for it, too: his banjaxing of Jules Plisson in 2015, taking out the France fly-half with such ferocity that Twickenham gasped en masse, is the second most-watched highlight on the Six Nations’ YouTube account, with 1.4 million views (watch video below). Now he, too, is pushing back against the rhetoric that rugby should be made safer, arguing that the core of rugby’s appeal is as a gladiatorial scrap.

Such a philosophy extends beyond Test level. Notice the tone of Simon Massie-Taylor, chief executive of Premiership Rugby, who, far from extrapolating the direst warnings from dementia headlines, is adamant that the sport’s physicality is crucial to public enjoyment of the domestic top flight. He has cited a survey that suggests enthusiasm for eye-watering tackles is most prevalent among 18- to 24-year-olds, the demographic previously thought to be put off by the health risks. Online trends support this thesis, with Championship club Coventry last week posting footage of one thunderous contact, setting it to bass-heavy music and labelling it “collision of the week” (watch video below).

A fascinating, counter-intuitive cultural shift is under way. The widespread expectation, when the extent of the neurological injury lawsuit emerged last December, was that rugby would need to reinvent itself, that tackle laws would need to be made more stringent. But the reverse appears to be happening, where rugby, far from retreating into its shell, is jutting out its chest and insisting that it has nothing for which to apologise.

It is as if the game has gone full circle, to a time when physical obliterations were anything but taboo. Rewind to 1993, when a demonic-looking Brian Moore was pictured on a Nike poster alongside the slogan: “It’s not the winning that counts. It’s the taking apart.” So much for the subsequent Rugby Football Union handwringing, decrying such statements as irresponsible. Rugby is heading back to its roots, with Martin happily delivering the destruction that Lawes once merrily wrought. Replays of Lawes’ wipe-out of Plisson are instructive, as you can even hear referee Nigel Owens shouting: “Tackle was fair, timing was good.” It was brutal, but it was acceptable. And that, according to a growing school of thought, is exactly as it should be.

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