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Martial art gets a stranglehold
Andrew Stevenson | August 17, 2007
IT HAS taken 100 years, but rugby league is finally mining the deep past of jujitsu and Greco-Roman wrestling in the latest search for an edge.
Although the grapple tackle controversy is four years old, latest adaptations have those involved in the game struggling to come up with even the right term for the tackle, if only to forbid it.
The crusher, for instance, is the latest tag. In fact, it's hundreds of years old and is known in the Japanese martial art of jujitsu as kubi gatame, a neck extension.
The Herald invited Simon Crook, a second dan black belt and instructor with The Jitsu Foundation, to run his eye over recent game footage.
What he saw he found familiar - and scary.
Take hadaka jime, the naked strangle. "That's not nice; it's very crude but very effective," Crook said of a tackle by the Titans' Ian Donnelly on Bulldogs fullback Luke Patten in July.
"He [Donnelly] is pulling both his forearms into the side of his [Patten's] neck and pushing down with his head," Crook explained. Patten got up slowly. No surprise really to Crook. "If he's had his blood supply cut off for one [to] two seconds he'll be very light-headed; by six, seven seconds, he'll black out."
Timana Tahu's tackle of Brad Morrin - followed by the much more infamous bite during the Eels-Bulldogs round-21 clash - Crook saw as a mixture of ushiro morote gari, with Nathan Hindmarsh pulling Morrin's shins out from under him, followed by Tahu using a drop knee technique as he left the ground, adding his weight to Morrin's in the fall.
Morrin's head twists on impact. "The strain on the neck there is incredibly dangerous - you're crushing the vertebra on one side and extending them on the other," Crook said.
"If he [Morrin] didn't have very, very strong neck muscles he wouldn't have got up. When you start messing with people's necks you can put them in a wheelchair."
Twisting necks in the tackle - often using the hip or torso, rather than the arm - will make the ball player want to stop pushing ahead. They may not even be aware of what is happening.
"It's survival instincts: if you feel a force on your neck you're going to want to ease it, not force it."
But it's not all about the head and neck.
Souths' Ben Rogers performed a classic hiji gatame (elbow lock) on Cronulla's Greg Bird, securing the arm and landing on it with his own body weight. Rogers said there was no intent to injure Bird and that he was just trying to pull his arm down.
Crook said: "He [Rogers] has pretty much got the shoulder [of Bird] at the limit and that would hurt but when he falls on it that's going to kill [as] he's keeping the tension and twisting the elbow."
Common in cage fighting, Crook said it was a totally valid technique to get a submission. "Someone's shown him that," the jujitsu expert said.
http://www.leaguehq.com.au/news/news/martial-art-gets-a-stranglehold/2007/08/16/1186857684363.html
Andrew Stevenson | August 17, 2007
IT HAS taken 100 years, but rugby league is finally mining the deep past of jujitsu and Greco-Roman wrestling in the latest search for an edge.
Although the grapple tackle controversy is four years old, latest adaptations have those involved in the game struggling to come up with even the right term for the tackle, if only to forbid it.
The crusher, for instance, is the latest tag. In fact, it's hundreds of years old and is known in the Japanese martial art of jujitsu as kubi gatame, a neck extension.
The Herald invited Simon Crook, a second dan black belt and instructor with The Jitsu Foundation, to run his eye over recent game footage.
What he saw he found familiar - and scary.
Take hadaka jime, the naked strangle. "That's not nice; it's very crude but very effective," Crook said of a tackle by the Titans' Ian Donnelly on Bulldogs fullback Luke Patten in July.
"He [Donnelly] is pulling both his forearms into the side of his [Patten's] neck and pushing down with his head," Crook explained. Patten got up slowly. No surprise really to Crook. "If he's had his blood supply cut off for one [to] two seconds he'll be very light-headed; by six, seven seconds, he'll black out."
Timana Tahu's tackle of Brad Morrin - followed by the much more infamous bite during the Eels-Bulldogs round-21 clash - Crook saw as a mixture of ushiro morote gari, with Nathan Hindmarsh pulling Morrin's shins out from under him, followed by Tahu using a drop knee technique as he left the ground, adding his weight to Morrin's in the fall.
Morrin's head twists on impact. "The strain on the neck there is incredibly dangerous - you're crushing the vertebra on one side and extending them on the other," Crook said.
"If he [Morrin] didn't have very, very strong neck muscles he wouldn't have got up. When you start messing with people's necks you can put them in a wheelchair."
Twisting necks in the tackle - often using the hip or torso, rather than the arm - will make the ball player want to stop pushing ahead. They may not even be aware of what is happening.
"It's survival instincts: if you feel a force on your neck you're going to want to ease it, not force it."
But it's not all about the head and neck.
Souths' Ben Rogers performed a classic hiji gatame (elbow lock) on Cronulla's Greg Bird, securing the arm and landing on it with his own body weight. Rogers said there was no intent to injure Bird and that he was just trying to pull his arm down.
Crook said: "He [Rogers] has pretty much got the shoulder [of Bird] at the limit and that would hurt but when he falls on it that's going to kill [as] he's keeping the tension and twisting the elbow."
Common in cage fighting, Crook said it was a totally valid technique to get a submission. "Someone's shown him that," the jujitsu expert said.
http://www.leaguehq.com.au/news/news/martial-art-gets-a-stranglehold/2007/08/16/1186857684363.html
