School rugby is brutal, but banning it would be a ridiculous move

Rugby can be a vicious and dangerous sport, but even for children the benefits far outweigh the risks

Football, we were told on the first day at big school, is played with an oval ball. That game with the round ball is called soccer, and it is not a game for real men.

This was not in America, but in that slightly foreign part of Britain that is the private school system. I had been in state education until the age of 11, and the two worlds were very different.

Sport at my junior school mostly involved running around a field - possibly chasing a ball, maybe passing a baton - with no real focus. There would be a member of staff watching, but his main job was to prevent escaping and stabbing. The sport itself didn't really matter, the only aim was to get to the hometime bell with roughly the same number of pupils that you started out with.

But at the fee-paying, boys-only school everything changed. Sport was taken extremely seriously, and the only one that mattered was rugby.

We were organised into three groups of 30 based on ability. The top group comprised the A and B teams, which would play against each other during the week and then against other schools at the weekend. Everyone in the middle group was involved in a constant battle for personal promotion or relegation. Then there was the bottom group, the no-hopers. The boys in this group were called, in an early introduction to irony, the All Stars.

In the first year, the only winter sport offered was rugby. By the second year, if you showed no sign of being able to drag yourself out of All Stars ignominy, you were allowed - as a show of mercy - to start playing hockey, which was considered almost, but not quite, as much of a girl's game as soccer.

Rugby is a vicious game. We would discuss the various incidences of maiming with grim schoolboy glee. Any injury you sustained, unless bones were actually protruding from your skin, would be met with the same response from the teachers: "Run it off, boy!"

Everyone who played has at least one traumatic memory of feeling too sick or hurt to continue while a member of staff with anger issues shouted at him to stop being such a blouse and get on with it. But for all that cruelty it did us good. Knowing that you always have extra reserves of strength to go on however bad you feel is an important life skill that we forget at our peril.

News that again there have been warnings that school rugby 'harms children', with calls to ban it, are not surprising. Professor Allyson Pollock, an expert in Public Health at Queen Mary, University of London, voiced her concerns in the British Medical Journal this week, saying: "Given that children are more susceptible to injuries such as concussion and often take longer to recover fully, the Government's plan to increase funding of and participation in rugby in schools in the absence of a comprehensive system for injury surveillance and prevention is worrying."

But banning it, or eviscerating it by stopping scrums and tackling, would be wrong. Yes, there are occasionally terrible injuries, which we need to address as far as we can with measures such as taking suspected concussions seriously. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and it shouldn't just be played by people who are privileged enough to go to private schools with teachers whose views are stuck in the glorious past.

I personally quite like watching a bit of the round ball game, and don't even mind if people call it football. But watching Premier League soccerists roll around on the floor after the lightest tap on the ankle is an affront to the manliness of a nation. Is this really an approach to sport - or to life - that we want to instil in our children?

(China Daily 05/09/2015 page23)