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Aaron Carpenter is a rugby man
Aaron Carpenter is a rugby man, and has been since he was 13 and his brother first taught him how to play. Carpenter played 80 Brian McCann Jersey games for Canada, which is a national record, and hundreds more for Coventry, Cornish Pirates, Doncaster Knights, and a bunch of other sides, including, when his schedule allowed, his home town team the Brantford Harlequins, where his mum is the club treasurer. He is the kind of player you will know much of only if he happened to play for your team. Then you will remember him very well, because he could never do enough for his club. He played hooker or No 8, wherever his team most needed him.

A couple of weeks back, Carpenter quit. He had taken three blows to the head in a row. They were not bad but they did not need to be. A lot of players have had to make similar decisions. The RFU’s statistics show 44 professional players have quit the English leagues because of assorted injuries in the last three years. The day after Carpenter, the Scotland full-back Peter Murchie announced he was retiring on medical advice too, a couple of days before his 32nd birthday.
It is a sign both of how severe rugby’s concussion problem is and how well-informed the players now are about the risks. As Carpenter told the Canadian Press, it wasn’t long ago “you got your bell rung and you went back out there and played”.
So it was not Carpenter’s decision that stood out but what he had to say once he had made up his mind. Carpenter admitted that, much as he loves rugby, he felt “a bit of relief” now he had retired. He is a hard http://www.hockeyjetsofficialauthenticshop.com/Kyle_Connor_Jersey_Adidas man but it has become a brutally unforgiving sport. “From when I started playing rugby to where it is now, the injuries have gotten worse and worse. I don’t know,” he said. “The guys are http://www.officialauthenticheat.com/Alonzo_Mourning_Jersey getting bigger, stronger, faster. It takes its toll.” His life in rugby had been “a career of 13 years of getting beat up”. He had broken both his arms. Every day, his back aches when he wakes.
Carpenter does not regret anything. The game took him around the world, gave him good friends and great memories. Only he is 35 now, has three young children, and all of a sudden the sport’s rewards do not seem worth the cost. Every professional player has to run that same calculation and sooner or later a lot reach the same conclusion, because Carpenter is right about the way the game is going. The RFU’s past two surveys of the professional game show that while the overall number of injuries decreased in 2014-15 and 2015-16, the severity of those injuries Womens Eddie Murray Jersey got worse. nba jerseys wholesale nba basketball jerseys baseball jerseys custom nike nfl jerseys 2016