By the time you are reading this, it would be lovely to think the events of one day in September were well behind us, and more or less some distant and vague memory.
But anyone who woke after the AFL Grand Final experiencing a dull thudding based on certain key moments in the last four minutes of the match might not find it so easy to deal with the way the Fremantle Dockers let their first premiership (even typing the words can induce some scrambling in the tear ducts) slip into the hands of the extremely slick and dogged Brisbane Lions.
Speaking of dull thuds, in the spring edition of medicSA, the very good journal of our friends at AMA South Australia, the cover story is about concussion in sport. It’s an issue that rears its, well, head, constantly now. Most recently, that doyenne of Australian cricketers, Steve Smith received a bad blow during the first Test against South Africa.
Such incidents can well shape the course of sports contests, depending on the outcome for individual key players. Another former Test cricketer, Will Pucovski, is suing his old school, believing a football concussion was the reason he had to retire from cricket before his talent could be fully realised.
In medicSA, Adelaide Football Club head doctor Dr Marc Cesana talks about the many protocols surrounding concussion at AFL level, including a dedicated concussion ‘spotter’ doctor watching games live from Melbourne. This is in addition to cooperation between the team’s doctors, such that the second doctor can assess incidents via video replay before it’s decided if intervention on the field is required.
Yet Dr Cesana believes the onus is still on the athletes themselves to describe their own symptoms accurately, rather than initially through the testing regime that would routinely end up with our excellent pathologists, whose work is explored in a feature in this edition.
“It would be nice if we had a foolproof biological test that gave us a reliable and sensitive diagnosis of concussion. But we don’t have that, so we have to rely on a limited range of objective tests and athlete history to make a concussion diagnosis,” he said.
The raised awareness of concussion in sport points to some advances in medicine, but also a general advance in our perception of how we conduct ourselves on sports fields, and the protections we believe each athlete should be afforded.
Meanwhile, thoughts of the 2026 grand final erased, I look forward to the dull thud of waking after next year’s version, still marvelling at having seen the Dockers holding their first premiership cup aloft.
