THE neck injury suffered by Malvern's 18-year-old winger Ben Ash rocked his club last week.

One moment the youngster was charging down the wing and the next he was being airlifted to hospital without any feeling in his legs.

Fortunately he is expected to make a full recovery but his club mate Joe Roper is still in a wheelchair after a neck injury last February.

And only three weeks ago Worcester's mini-juniors witnessed the sight of an air ambulance taking a 12-year-old boy to hospital with neck injuries.

It is the unspoken truth that serious neck injuries are a fact of life in rugby and even international superstars are not immune as the case of Welsh captain Gwyn Jones showed last season. He is still fighting a battle just to walk again after being injured in a club match.

And statistics collected by Sheffield Medical School in 1990 show that, on average, a rugby player will pick up an injury every 20 games - three times as often than in martial arts.

But Simon Roberts a sports injury specialist at Oswestry Orthopaedic Hospital does not believe it is a case of players risking their lives.

"That's going a bit far because such devastating injuries are rare," said the former Oxford and Cambridge rugby Blue.

"Rugby players often suffer injury, but they tend to be minor injuries, things like bruises, strains and sprains."

But the fact remains serious injuries still happen so what can be done to prevent them?

Rule changes are an obvious area and small adjustments are always being made.

But Mr Roberts said the majority of serious injuries happen in open play so tinkering with set scrums is unlikely to have much of an effect.

He added the players most at risk are back row forwards not front row as most people expect.

Mr Roberts played as a scrum-half and has no qualms about allowing his young sons to take up the game.

"But I'd encourage them to be backs rather than forwards."

Monday, February 1, 1999.