Lower tackle height cuts head injuries by 23% in community rugby, RFU data shows

The lowering of the legal tackle height in community rugby to below the sternum has reduced reported concussions by 23% over two seasons, according to data published by the Rugby Football Union on Monday, the most comprehensive assessment yet of a law change that was bitterly contested when it was introduced in 2023.

The RFU analysed injury reports from 1,100 clubs across the men’s and women’s community game, covering about 180,000 player-matches per season, and found that head injuries resulting in a player leaving the field fell from 2.6 per 1,000 player-hours in the final season under the old law to 2.0 last season. Injuries to the tackler fell more sharply than injuries to the ball-carrier, which the union said was the intended effect.

Penalties for high tackles, which rose by 60% in the first season of the new law and prompted complaints from clubs that games were being “refereed to a standstill”, fell back last season to a level 12% above the pre-change baseline. The RFU said that was evidence that players had adapted.

“The first season was hard and we have never pretended otherwise,” said Dr Simon Kettering, the union’s medical director. “Players were being penalised for tackles that had been legal for 100 years, and that is a difficult thing to accept on a cold Saturday. But the numbers are now clear. Fewer people are being hurt, and the game is being played at roughly the same tempo it was before.”

The data is less reassuring on the law’s application. A survey of 1,400 community referees found that 21% believed the height was being judged inconsistently between referees, and 34% said they had been subjected to abuse over a high-tackle decision in the past season. The RFU has committed £400,000 to additional referee training and to a video review service that lets referees submit footage of borderline tackles for feedback.

Clubs remain divided. The chairman of a club in Cheshire that lost 40 adult players in the first season of the change, many of them, he said, in protest, told the Meridian that “most of them have drifted back, and the ones who have not were probably on their way out anyway”. A club in Cornwall said its women’s section had grown by a third since the change and credited the law directly.

The international game continues to play to the old height, a discrepancy that World Rugby is expected to address at its council meeting in November, where a global trial of the lower height in the professional game is on the agenda. Kettering said the RFU would “make its views known”, and that those views were “not hard to guess”.

The community season runs until April. The RFU said it would publish a third year of data next October, by which point, Kettering said, “the argument should be over. Whether it will be is another matter.”