Rugby is a thrillingly-dangerous game. Bones break, scars form. That's is part of its appeal. There's nothing quite like the feeling when you are in a changing room looking at your teammates knowing each and every one of them is willing to put their bodies on the line for you and you for them. Those unique bonds last a lifetime.
Very rarely terrible accidents do happen to individuals such as Matt Hampson, who dislocated his neck at a collapsed scrum. But if you were to ask him if he could go back and never play rugby again, I think he would say no, in part because of the bonds he made. The "Get Busy Living" logo from his terrific foundation sums up his attitude.
What rugby's authorities have to stop doing is pretending it is a perfectly safe at all levels. Clearly it is not. What they need to agree upon is the level of acceptable risk, which differs hugely depending on the level you play the game. At grassroots level the physical and not to mention social benefits will vastly outweigh the odd bump and bruise. At a higher level there is a trade-off between a serious risk to your long-term health versus being paid to play the game you love.
I understand why people are so concerned about concussion. Hips and knees can be replaced; brains cannot. However it is also important to recognise how far we have come in this area. In the olden days if you got knocked out, you would stay on the pitch not knowing where you were for several minutes or sometimes hours afterwards. The only sign it was serious was if you started to throw up.
You would come off the field, say to the coach or doctor that you don't know where you are or what the score is, and they would just say to the other players 'keep an eye on him, if he starts throwing up then take him to hospital'.
That's how much care you received little more than 10 years ago. It happened to me on quite a few occasions and you wonder what will become of my generation further down the line.
Amending the laws to prevent head-on-head clear-outs at the ruck and challenging players in the air were important steps in the right direction. However, you will never be able to prevent concussions from happening.
My fear is that a lot of these changes are less to do with the long-term benefit of athletes than about the legal connotations of what happens if one of these injured athletes wins a court case?
World Rugby, the RFU, clubs and schools could end up paying hundreds of lawsuits to past injured players. It could end up being like PPI. You'll get a phone call with an automated message: "Have you been injured in a rugby accident that was not your fault?" That's the real danger. Are we getting to a stage where you have to sign a disclaimer before you run on to the pitch, like you do with bungee-jumping or sky-diving, that anything that happens on the pitch is down to you?
The protection against that is the overall ethos of the game. Again that is fraught with peril because it means different things to different people. Overall I would take it to mean a mutual respect between players who are putting themselves in harm's way every time they take the field.
Problems occur when that ethos is abused by players faking being unconscious to attempt to get an opponent sent off.
I am not including North in that bracket but there are other incidents that have been highly suspicious. Everyone bears a responsibility. Players, coaches, medics and officials to ensure that the game is as safe as possible without pretending there is 0 per cent risk.
The ultimate end point to making the game safer is make the players smaller. How do you do that? Reduce the role of the scrum, reduce the number of replacements which would straight away put a premium on speed and skill over strength and size. Even without a medical background it stands to reason that the lighter the players, the weaker the collisions would be and, hopefully, fewer concussions as a result.
