​The National Rugby League Is Back And It's More Terrifying Than Ever

The first round of the National Rugby League (NRL) is a wrap bringing to a close the most brutal weekend of full-speed body collisions since the end of last season. Seriously, this game is so violent you wonder how long it can exist for in its current form.

For the uninitiated, rugby league is the provincial, working class/welfare class cousin of the more worldly and better safe-guarded rugby union. It comprises 13 players a side, each averaging a touch over 100 kilograms, whose physiques have been moulded by way of state-of-the-art sports science to be as big and powerful and mobile as possible. The two teams stand 20 meters apart and slam into each other every single play for 80 minutes. Bar the odd piece of foam headgear, no one wears padding.

The results are shocking. Just ask Indianapolis Colts NFL tight end, Dwayne Allen.

"I definitely have an interest in the game from a fan perspective, but I could never do what those guys do, and I'd never try to do what those guys do,'' he told the Daily Telegraph recently.

"It takes a special human being to play NRL…I think the NFL and game of American football, all you have to do is be an athlete and be able to accept instructions to play the sport.

"In the NRL, there's something about the toughness it takes in order to play, I just don't have that, and I'm humble enough to say that.''

As round one of the 2017 NRL season prepared to get underway there were signs that the days of the sport being played like this may be numbered. The lawsuit leveraged by former NSW State of Origin player and Newcastle Knight James McManus against his former club for the way they dealt with concussion and head trauma during his playing days could have serious consequences for the way the game is played. But that's in the longterm. In the short term it exists much the way it has in the past and those first few collisions of the NRL season will take your breath away. Like this one from the Manly vs Parramatta game over the weekend.

via GIPHY

In the time between last season and this season it's as though your brain loses its grasp on the more visceral aspects of this sport; the spring-loaded 112 kilogram dynamo that is Sam Thaiday on a charge, for instance; or the madness of squeezing 26 of the most naturally-jacked humans on the planet into a 100 x 50 meter rectangle and telling them to run straight over each other; the severe impacts players absorb from numerous unnatural angles, often blindspots; the fact the body is not built to withstand this kind of punishment meaning serious, agonising injury is just a matter of time; the immense natural-born-physicality of the many Polynesians that dominate the code; and, on top of it all, the culture of malice that exists within the sport which compels players not only to survive but to go out of their way to injure their opponents. South Sydney hooker, Robbie Farah's sneaky ankle tweak on his old teammate, Mitchell Moses, looked to be a perfect example of the latter.

Within minutes of a ball being kicked in the 2017 regular season, Brisbane Broncos 103 kilogram backrower, Alex Glenn had also felt the wrath of rugby league when Cronulla Sharks and NSW State of Origin big man, Wade Graham, rushed out of the defensive line and slammed his 96 kilogram frame into his chest and shoulders. The season was only 26 minutes old and we had our first crash-test dummy.

Minutes later, Glenn's night got even worse when his jaw met the weapon-shaped forehead of Sam Tagataese on a charge leaving him seriously concussed. It would be just one of a dozen or so serious head knocks and concussions in the opening round. Elsewhere, failed English rugby union convert, Sam Burgess, rushed out of the South Sydney Rabbitohs defensive line to punish Tigers player, Elijah Taylor, with one of the most gruesome hits of the opening round. Listen to the sound of his cheekbone on Taylor's head as he ever so slightly mistimes the hit. Somehow his face withstands the 300 or so kilograms of impact (speed x weight) for a successful bone-cruncher on the Tigers player, who was left with a laceration to his ear but got up and kept running anyway. What a game.

It was in the same game that one of the more remarkable injury debacles unfolded when modern day great and South Sydney Rabbitohs captain, Greg Inglis, was forced by his coach to play two thirds of the match with a snapped or torn anterior cruciate ligament in his knee (he is awaiting scans). Inglis will now undergo surgery and miss at least six months.

When you play the game, as I did for over a decade at various levels (splitting my time between rugby union), you acclimatise to the brutality of it all and it becomes your new normal. As you get older and spend more years away from the game, and develop an understanding of what safety constitutes in a more global sporting sense, you begin to realise just how remarkable this game is. Also, why it probably won't exist like this forever. Which is why right now is such a great time to be a rugby league fan.