Whilst this doesn't allay my concerns, I've a couple of mates who've been playing union with restricted height tackles. After a few games with lots of pens & a few cards tacklers changed their approach. Year and a half on, it's pretty much a forgotten issue now, so they tell me.
With hindsight, the game should have brought these rules into the junior leagues 15 years ago when the talk around head impacts in contact sports started, so that we'd now have a generation of players and coaches who had already adapted to the new tackle height.
I think it will be chaotic for a while, but the refs will become more lenient over time, as Clearwing mentioned. That's basically what happened with the current rules for most of the games history. Any borderline tackle was usually let go.
Again I’m firmly in the camp of reasonable reduction of risk in training and games, and healthy return-to-play protocols.
We have to decide what level of risk is acceptable and understand you simply cannot design all risk out of a contact sport. Maybe it will be possible to find a balance but I haven’t seen it so far.
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