High Court leaves rugby brain injury case in balance

The cases of hundreds of players in rugby's multi-million-pound concussion legal battle remain in the balance.

After two days of proceedings at the High Court, the judge said he would reserve judgement on whether the claimants have complied with an order to provide documents surrounding the neurological testing process.

Senior Master Jeremy David Cook did not give a time frame for his decision, leaving both sides waiting for the next step of an already lengthy legal battle.

He will consider whether there have been breaches, whether to strike out the claims and what relief may be granted.

Players from both rugby union and rugby league claim the governing bodies failed to put safeguards in place to protect them from the consequences of repeated head impacts.

World Rugby, the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU), Rugby Football Union (RFU) and Rugby Football League (RFL) deny breaching a duty of care to protect the players from injury.

Lawyers acting for those organisations want cases involving 337 players in union and 153 in league to be struck out.

There have been legal clashes over the sharing of the former players' medical information since the action began in 2020.

Lawyers for the governing bodies are asking for cases they claim do not have all the required documents to be struck out, in order to prevent more delays ahead of a trial.

In a further development, lawyer Richard Boardman, who has represented the claimants through Rylands Garth, will no longer be acting on the ex-players' behalf.

In a statement released after Wednesday's hearing, former Wales union forward Alix Popham said the former players thanked Rylands Garth for its work but felt the switch in representation was necessary because of the "scale and complexity" of the case.

Popham said: "We believe this represents a positive step in progressing the litigation. We hope it will help provide the momentum required to move the proceedings forward as efficiently as possible and address some of the factors that have contributed to the pace of the litigation to date."

With the claimants still in the process of finding new representation, Senior Master Cook said the statement raised "more questions than answers" amid concerns about further delays while any new representation gets up to speed.

The judge criticised Boardman's reaction to the order, stating that there was "not a bit of mea culpa (my fault)" and that there had been a "total failure by Mr Boardman to get to grips and deal with the criticisms that have been made".

Lawyers for the players said it would be a "significant injustice" if some players' claims are struck out and other are not.

Senior Master Cook expressed his sympathy for the claimants at risk of having their cases struck out.

"We have got three buses full of passengers going to the same destination," he said.

"The first bus, the driver drives them off a cliff and the result is that they don't get to the destination.

"The other two get to the destination. What of those on the first bus?"

England rugby union World Cup winners Steve Thompson, Mark Regan and Phil Vickery and former Wales internationals Colin Charvis, Gavin Henson, Ryan Jones, Lee Byrne and Popham are among the high-profile former players involved in the case.