A lesson in how to build your audience

JEFF PROBYN

A FRONT ROW VIEW OF THE GAME

Well, if ever there was a lesson for rugby to learn from football, the women's European Championship final certainly displayed one in England's victory over Germany. Not just about how to win a game but also how to get a larger share of the game's global audience. The first major prize won in football since 1966 was achieved in front of an 87,192 packed Wembley stadium and a peak TV and digital audience of close to 23 million viewers.

Compare that to the less than 30,000 crowd and just over half a million TV and digital viewers which is the current record in women's rugby, and you can see the potential growth that should be there for the taking.

With all sport at a crossroads, as the playing numbers in men's sport decline while the women' s seems to be blossoming across the spectrum, is it any wonder that, from the government through to the sports council, huge investments are being given to various sports to encourage diversification and grow the girls' games?

Sadly, as I wrote last week, in the world of sport, this doesn't come without risk as participating in any physical activity can be dangerous and result in life-changing injuries.

Whether falling from a horse while galloping along a country path or off a skateboard in a concrete skate park, the risk of injuries are set to be with us whenever we try something new and physical.

In the world of rugby there have always been efforts to reduce those risks by adapting the laws of the game to hopefully make the game safer. When a series of serious injuries that occurred in scrums at youth level in New Zealand at the end of the 1990s, a number of variations in the laws were brought in for U19 age grade rugby, and referees were given control of the engagement in the senior game. These variations have been added to over the years in an effort to reduce injury risk and have succeeded to an extent. Unfortunately, it was also New Zealand that changed the game and made it a more dangerous sport with the introduction of the first ever 6ft 4in, 19st back, Jonah Lomu.

Before Jonah, any player his size was automatically selected as a forward and in fact that was where he used to play his rugby, in the back row, but his arrival on the wing changed everything.

When Jonah broke onto the world stage he usually had a one-on-one contest against a player who was usually one of the smallest members of the opposition team (the winger) and would run directly through or over them. This immediately lead to every other nation finding a ‘Lomu' of their own, which then led to the rapid growth in the size of the players playing in the backs.

“Lomu's reputation was based on the fact he was the first of his kind”

Lomu's reputation as a player was based on the fact that he was the first of his kind, as never before had there been a back of his size.

His skill was his size as that allowed him to overwhelm his opposite number and score.

Jonah came to fame at the dawn of the professional era and indirectly influenced the way that the game has been played ever since.

From a game for all shapes and sizes, has born a ‘bigger is best' mentality that has indirectly lead to the game we have today.

This in turn has resulted in the high number of head contacts as players attempt to run through their opposition rather than around them. One of the facts that makes the women's game more attractive than the men's is that it is still a game for all shapes and sizes with the emphasis on finding space to run into, not the opposition.

However, I have always thought that there should be law variations specific to the women's game because of the differences in physical anatomy just as there are the U19 variations for youth rugby, because of different maturity rates in young players.

The RFU have announced that they are banning transgender players from playing contact rugby in the women's game because of the anatomical differences (including brain connections) in those born men that could increase injury risk for the women and girls they play against, which I think makes sense.

However, what is a surprise is that transgender players will still be allowed to play contact rugby in the men's game if they take a risk assessment and declare they understand the risks considering the medical information that those born women are more likely to suffer brain injury through head contact than those born men.

With head contact unfortunately likely to be more prevalent in the men's game I would have thought it would have persuaded the powers that be to take action to protect the transgender players.

If the medical advice says that men and women should not compete in the same game on the same pitch because of the greater risk of injury to one group or the other as a result of anatomical differences then, for the sake of safety, this law should be applied across the game whether transgender or not.