Another week has gone by and another player has been forced to retire because of injury. This time it was Ben Lewis, one of the most promising talents in Welsh rugby. His age – just 24.
I remember going to interview Ben down in Swansea a few years ago when he was being talked about as Martyn Williams’s successor in the Wales No 7 shirt and was a player firmly on Warren Gatland’s radar. He was a very unassuming guy; there was no hint of arrogance and he was just focused on what he wanted to achieve in the game.
Injuries have blighted his career in the past couple of years, however, and the latest one to his neck has forced him to retire having never got the chance to justify the hype surrounding his ability. His life had been mapped out for the next decade or so but now, at 24 and with his sporting dreams in tatters, he now has to reassess, decide what to do next and figure out how he’s going to earn a living.
Will he need new qualifications? What job does he want to do? How do you cope with life in the real world? Ben must now ask himself the questions we have been dealing with since our late teens and have subsequently resolved. By our mid-20s, most of us will have started plotting our own career path and life goals. He’s starting from scatch and is at a distinct disadvantage to many others of a similar age as he tries to adapt to his new circumstances.
I wish Ben all the best for whatever he opts to do in the future, but his case is one of too many in rugby right now. Injuries are always going to be a part of contact sport – there’s no getting around that – but it’s the severity of the injuries these days that concerns me, the number of players, especially young ones, whose careers are ended before they’ve really got going. And as they cope with the huge void in their life, they must also concentrate on paying the bills.
As a professional sport and with the improvements made in strength and conditioning, sports science and so on, players have become bigger and more powerful. But have they become too big and too powerful? Have skills been lost in favour of brawn? Are the hits in today’s game too much for the body to take? After all, it can only cope with so much.
The game would not exist without players and the number of injuries in the headlines is sure to worry parents. Will they still be keen to take little Jimmy down to minis training on a Sunday morning when they see pictures of Olly Barkley being carried off on a stretcher with a double leg break? It’s easy to see why they wouldn’t, but if those images do put parents off where will the next generation of players come from?
It’s an issue that the IRB are addressing with national team doctors like James Robson (Scotland) and Simon Kemp (England) on a new panel looking into player welfare. They are far better equipped to come up with solutions than I – be that less games, more rest, better research into injury prevention – I just sincerely hope they do.
Tags: Ben Lewis, injuries, Olly Barkley, Ospreys, rugby
