LONG READ David Flatman: 'I love watching bone-shuddering tackles, monster ball carries and crushingly intense scrummaging'

All these little tweaks to the laws of rugby do take some thinking about. On the latest scrum amendments, I’ve still a bit of reading and thinking to do on it, but it does instinctively feel like the next step in the systematic depowering and ultimate dilution of one of the most iconic – and certainly the most unique – aspects of our great sport.

As with any ‘new’ law, there will be ways to manipulate things for unintended advantages, but the extent of such manipulations can’t ever be known until the game’s paid thinkers take time to find an angle.

The game and its custodians must, of course, always bear in mind its potential appeal to new viewers and stakeholders, but I have felt for some time that the game itself – specifically ‘over here’ in the UK – might be spending rather too much time trying to convince the world that it is a game for everyone.

Rugby is not a game for everyone and it never will be. It is too hard to be a game for everyone. Rugby at all levels requires courage, and with courageous endeavour comes pride, kinship, and the joy and fulfilment and inclusion that comes from taking on difficult things with groups of friends and coming through them together, forging bonds along the way. Football, the great beast of global sport, is by no means a game for everyone, by the way.

Rugby will always be a bit dangerous. It has to be and we must stop apologising for this. Like it or not – and some simply never will – risk is part of rugby’s charm. We must never, of course, stop investing time and money into making it as safe as we reasonably can, but the notion of making a game replete with ballistic collisions a safe one is nonsensical and unrealistic.

Watch some Australian Rugby League. Watch some South African sides play one another on South African television, and you’ll see that we push the ‘player safety’ narrative far harder than anyone else. In one sense this is a gallant effort, of course, but I can tell you that we are now at a stage where the broadcasters you love the most – and the ones you don’t! – will very often preface every other sentence with ‘obviously player safety is paramount’ as if on autopilot, before going on to offer an actual view. In truth, we kind of feel like we have to, as we all now unconsciously fear the abuse that may come our way should we not say it. It’s that simple.

Before I am predictably accused in the comments section of being a glib ex-pro who thinks the game’s gone soft (for the record, I don’t; I think the game is so much harder than it was even a decade ago that I regularly find myself open-mouthed at what modern players now contribute on the field), let me tell you that I have days when I forget things, when I’m inexplicably irritable, when my lethargy and procrastination feels terminal, when even the shortest to-do list feels utterly insurmountable.

Like many of my contemporaries, I internally cross my fingers that my brain isn’t so damaged that it begins to fail, and that I will indeed be able to see and enjoy my young daughters become women. So I am not suggesting we promote dangerous hits, or that we stop talking about keeping players as safe as we can.

What I am suggesting is that we stop trying to be everyone’s best mate. Rugby is incredibly hard. You need to be a certain sort of person to play it. You need to be evasive, skilled, tough, resilient. And if you’re not, it can teach you to be so. Rugby offers a huge amount, and celebrating those life-affirming aspects of a wonderful game would seem a better route to growth than behaving like a pack of advocates scared actually to advocate for what we believe and what we love.

There’s no need to be scared of saying what we think. I desperately do not want anyone to get hurt, but I accept that they might. I felt just the same about myself, as a player.

I love watching bone-shuddering tackles, brutal clear-outs, monster ball carries, and crushingly intense scrummaging. I love it. These things make my heart rate spike. These aren’t the only things I love about rugby, but I feel no need to pretend I don’t love them, or to apologise for loving them just in case someone thinks I shouldn’t.

All this constant tweaking of the laws, as well-meaning as it all is, might well serve to both overcomplicate the game even further (more things to learn for the casual viewer) and to give the impression of a sport that, despite being desperate to take over the world and reap all the riches that come with such expansion, isn’t quite comfortable in its own skin.