By Melissa Fyfe, Carol Nader, Rohan Connolly
June 6, 2006

On Saturday night, the footballer Blake Caracella, a star Collingwood forward, was flat on his back on the Melbourne Cricket Ground turf. His arms and legs were tingling. There was some loss of feeling. The panic must have been overwhelming.

"He had a lot of thoughts going through his own mind about what might be going on," Collingwood Football Club doctor Paul Blackman said yesterday. "He was frightened at that point."

Caracella suffered a spinal injury in a collision with an opposition player. The ball was loose; Caracella had his head over it, the Brisbane Lions' Tim Notting was sliding in on his knees.

Caracella's spinal injury is a measure of how brutal Australian football can be. The neck-crunching blow against the hip of Notting - a close friend and former teammate - was similar to the kinds of neck damage usually seen in car crashes or in falls from a great height.

Caracella narrowly escaped life in a wheelchair probably because he is a professional athlete, with a muscular buffer around his neck, his doctors said. However, Dr Blackman said he was "quite close" to being a quadriplegic. It was, he said, the worst incident he had seen on a football field.

The 29-year-old suffered an uncomplicated fracture in the C5 Vertebrae, but this is the least of his worries. Although Caracella is expected to make a full recovery, he still has some tingling in his hands and doctors are concerned about bruising to the spinal cord - the sensitive column of nerve tissue that sends messages between the brain and the body - which happened when the footballer's neck was bent leftwards and backwards. Caracella will need to be in a neck brace for six weeks - and possibly up to 12 - to heal his fracture and to protect the spinal cord.

Even though serious spinal injuries are rare in football - only Footscray's Neil Sachse has been left paralysed at the game's senior level - the Caracella incident reignited the debate about the code's efforts to protect players from debilitating harm.

AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said yesterday the game was doing enough to protect players, through the Laws of the Game Committee and the tribunal. The charging rule had been amended. But he said the nature of the game was that the ball was often on the ground in dispute and collisions were inevitable.

"From time to time, though, you do get incidents that happen," he said. "I think it highlights and demonstrates again that this game is a game of physical contact. Those people who have said the game's getting soft are way off mark."

Demetriou said when he saw the Carcella incident he felt "sick to the stomach". But yesterday he put out a plea to parents who may not let their kids play football after seeing such injuries.

Collingwood chief executive Greg Swann said it was time to do something about protecting the head, which he said should be treated as "sacrosanct". There was no suggestion the knock from Notting was a deliberate act, Swann said, but "the head must be protected and if the rules need to be amended then so be it, because these are the consequences that could happen and it's very serious".

"I think people with their head over the ball need to be protected," he said.

This idea is well-intentioned but the question is this: can you regulate to prevent spinal injuries in AFL without neutering the game?

Dr Hugh Seward, a practising sports physician and president of the AFL Medical Offi cers Association, said spinal injuries were of great concern but rare and difficult to prevent through changes to the rules. "The reason is that it is basically just two people going for the ball desperately," he said. Slowing the game or stopping players from sliding on their knees would not stop it. Club doctors were more worried about head injuries from direct tackles. "We've been concerned for a long time about the direct tackle to the head and neck of the player that is bent over the ball," said Seward. "A number of high-profile players have been booked with reckless charge, and we support the AFL in its efforts to eradicate that. But I think spinal injuries will stay a fairly rare event."

The stakes, however, are high. Sports medicine experts say Caracella is very lucky he is not a quadriplegic. An analysis of spinal cord injuries in all codes of football between 1997 and 2002, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, found 52 footballers - 45 adults and seven schoolboys - suffered acute spinal cord injuries. The average annual incidence of these injuries was 3.2 per 100,000 players in rugby union and 1.5 per 100,000 in rugby league. But in Australian rules football the rate was only 0.5 per 100,000 players. And in soccer, it was even lower - 0.2 per 100,000 players. Overall, 39per cent of injured players became permanently wheelchair-dependent, the study found. Most of the injuries occurred at the amateur level of the game.

The director of the Victorian spinal cord service at Austin Health, Associate Professor Doug Brown, said the only known case where a spinal cord injury left a footballer a quadriplegic is that of Neil Sachse. Even the types of injuries Caracella sustained are rare.

"Sometimes if the person falls badly or gets knocked badly you can get damage to the vertebral column, the backbone and neck, but it's pretty uncommon in Australian rules," he said.

Brown said it was not a good idea for Caracella to play football again this year.

"I think if you had a major injury, it takes the body about nine to 12 months to heal, and I think you'd be foolish to indulge in any contact sport or high force sport in that year ... because you have so much to lose," he said.

"If it's half-healed then the next time it could be very serious."

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2006/06/05/1149359673624.html