It’s a long time since i played but it does seem to me that the senior game now is less about tackling, and more about ‘contact’. Huge players hitting each other repeatedly with forces that simply weren’t seen ‘back in the day’. We have video reels of massive hits, get any player onto a TV sports program and they almost always produce a tackle bag and measure how hard they can hit it, etc. And what happens in the big game transfers down, inevitably, to bodies that aren’t as well trained and aren’t as well conditioned.
The statistics do tend to speak for themselves.
Is it so wrong to therefore suggest that at school level, quite often in the hands of inexpert coaches, and trying to produce a lesson that caters for everyone from the guy who’s going to go on and play for his country down to the speccy kid shivering on the wing, that avoiding collisions is a good thing.
The call is not to ban tackling for kids outright, let it be coached properly at club level and developed there and let kids at school enjoy the other technical aspects of the game as a gateway to whether they want to go on to play contact? With school – club partnerships so that there is a clear onward path, and maybe with an opt-out for ‘elite’ schools that can provide the necessary coaching so that the ‘rugby’ schools can continue the traditional elements of school competitions.