When size matters, world rugby feels the impact

LONDON (Reuters) - When Daniel Wigley, who weighs 108 kilos and is two metres tall, jogs onto the field at his local rugby club in north London, he feels small.

Given his height and the position he plays in, Wigley wants to be heavier - with more muscle and bulk so he can jump higher and push harder.

"I'd like to be 18 stone (114kg)," Wigley, a 23-year-old software marketer, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of a Hampstead Rugby Club training session. "There's a lot of pressure in the modern game to be heavy, especially if you're my height."

Wigley's weight ambition shows how rugby union has evolved from a game for all types - from the small and speedy to the fat and fearless - into one where above all else, size matters.

Rugby players have always prided themselves on being tough. In a poke at soccer, rugby fans ask what's the difference between the two sports? Soccer is 90 minutes of pretending you're hurt, they say, while rugby is 80 minutes of pretending you're not.

The sport has become a game of giants, says Peter Milburn, a professor in the School of Allied Health Sciences at Australia's Griffith University who has analysed the rapidly and disproportionately increasing size of New Zealand's All Blacks.

Griffiths' as yet unpublished study, which tracked the All Blacks over more than a century, shows the average New Zealand international was 183.3 cm tall and 92.1kg only 35 years ago.

Now, the average All Black is 185.3cm and 96.5kg, and by the next Rugby World Cup in 2019, he'll be 188.6cm and nearly 107kg.

If these trends continue over the next 25-year generation, an All Black's average height and weight will be 195.4cm and 119.3kg - more than 10 percent taller and heavier than today.

A similar analysis of the England team found that their average weight rose from 92.3kg in 1994 to 105kg a decade later.

BIGGEST, STRONGEST, AND MOST INJURED

But with this growth has also come a change in the nature and number of injuries - a development many rugby aficionados, health experts, sports scientists and coaches see as unwelcome.

"The game has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. It's become a lot more confrontational and the emphasis now is about bulk and mass," Milburn told Reuters.

The implications of this are clear, he says, since a 20 percent increase in height is estimated to result in a 44 percent gain in strength.

"Sadly, the ironic thing now is that the most injured players are also the highest performing players - they are the fittest, strongest and fastest."

Twenty-three players have so far been forced by injury to withdraw from the 2015 World Cup being held by England - more already than the entire 2011 tournament, and there are still two weeks to go.

World Rugby officials said this was not out of the ordinary, citing more withdrawals from the 2007 contest, which saw 38 players forced home early.

Rugby authorities are acutely aware of the injury risks and are always seeking new ways to address the problem. Launching a new concussion awareness campaign called "Recognise And Remove" this week, World Rugby Chief Medical Officer Martin Rafferty said player welfare is the game's "number one priority".

"Education underpins our evidence-based approach to protecting players at all levels of the sport," he said.

In its annual injury audit for 2013-14, England's Rugby Football Union found concussion was the most common match injury for a third successive year, with head injuries accounting for 12.5 percent of all match injuries, a rise of 59 percent on the 2012-13 season.

Unlike American footballers or cricketers, rugby players don't wear helmets to protect against impact.

But it's not just heads that clash. Doctors say shoulders and knees take a beating too in the modern game - hardly surprising when players of such great bulk come together at such great speed.

PROTEIN, MUSCLE AND COLLISION

"People think the game is complicated, but it's actually become a glorified pushing competition ... and a heavier side will push a smaller side backwards," said Peter Breen, who coaches Wigley and others at the Hampstead club.

"You can still be fantastic if you're small, but if you're big you've got a massive advantage. Most of the guys here go to the gym, take protein supplements and aim to put on a couple of stone of muscle in their playing career."

All of which means that from the grass roots of rugby right up to elite international sides, injuries are never far away. And they are prompting calls from doctors, coaches and players for a halt to the game's obsession with size.

Doctors surveyed by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) earlier this year said the high rates of injury in rugby were "a cause for medical concern" in both adults and children. Some 65 percent of those who responded said the game's rules should change to reduce the risk of concussion.

Already, young players are introduced to the sport through tag rugby, where there is no tackling, kicking, scrums or line-outs for children in England aged eight and under.

Tackling is introduced later, and in stages, along with scrums and other physical aspects of the sport.

With players' safety in mind, the rules of adult rugby have also been tightened considerably over the past few years, for example outlawing the tackling of players while in the air, and banning high tackles around the neck and head.

One BMJ contributor, paediatric neurosurgeon Michael Carter who works in Bristol, southern England, described spending "an hour picking skull fragments out of the contused frontal lobes of a teenage rugby player" to explain why he thinks he is entitled to an opinion on the game's safety.

Breen says such images should give rugby lovers pause for reflection. "How did we get here?" he said. "How did we get to a position where this has become a game of colliding and of winning the collision? We've created our own problem."

(Additional reporting by Stuart McDill; editing by Peter Millership)