The Six Nations' failure to take disciplinary action over Tomas Francis' HIA incident has been witheringly called out by two medical experts.
A head injury review panel last week ruled that the 29-year-old tighthead should have been "immediately and permanently removed from play" after a clash of heads with team-mate Owen Watkin in the game against England at Twickenham on February 26. Francis was shown staggering after the incident and using a post to apparently support himself.
He was taken off for a head injury assessment, conducted by the independent matchday doctor, which he passed and he played on until the 56th minute. After working his way through relevant protocols, the player then started against France in the next Six Nations round.
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A number of recommendations were put forward by the investigating group (you can read the outcome of the report here ), but no sanctions were levelled against anyone, with the matter effectively declared closed without publicly revealing what went wrong.
All of which has left some prominent figures in the field of rugby injuries less than impressed
Speaking to The Rugby Paper, Professor John Fairclough and Dr Barry O’Driscoll spoke out strongly. “It’s an absolute disgrace,” said Fairclough, who used to work with the Welsh Rugby Union and is now part of the Progressive Rugby lobby group concerned with demanding better protection for players.
“We are surprised and dismayed that they seem to have trivialised a very serious matter by saying: 'We don’t need to go any further.’ Instead they should be asking a simple question. How did this happen? I do not know of any medical evidence which says that Tomas Francis was fit to play, not just in the England match but in the French one 13 days later.”
Dr O’Driscoll, a long-time critic of World Rugby’s concussion policy, told of his great surprise at the Six Nations organisation announcing they wouldn’t be “taking any subsequent disciplinary action” over the affair. “This is a most abject hearing into an injured patient,” he said. “It’s disgraceful.”
It didn't end there. Progressive Rugby as a group put out a statement calling for an urgent review of the head injury assessment protocol and suggested an opportunity had been missed to make the professional game safer: “While we all like to think we play at the same intensity as the All Blacks, the truth is that physical collisions at the top end are colossal and unrelenting.
“Just one more reason why it makes no sense that community rugby has a 19-day minimum stand-down following concussion, but under the six-stage Graduated Return to Play elite players can, and do, return to play in just six days. So, in our view this review is another golden opportunity missed.”
