Sport in the UK has been summoned to the headmaster's office. The announcement by the digital, culture, media and sport select committee that it is launching an inquiry into the links between sport and long-term brain injury serves notice that the matter has registered at a political level.
Of those shifting in their seats out in the corridor, football and both codes of rugby are the ones most obviously whispering questions to each other. Just how serious is this? Are they going through the motions, or are they going to start telling us what to do?
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The next few months will reveal how intent parliament is on addressing the gathering crisis in contact team sports. The imminent inquiry remains a long way short of any legislative intervention, but if football and rugby thought this was a storm simply to be ridden out, they now know higher powers are watching.
The DCMS committee has surveyed its territory and pulled out this problem as worthy of attention. There are five other inquiries currently on its agenda, including a review of broadband and the route to 5G, and the future of public service broadcasting. So concussion in sport is rubbing shoulders with some reasonably weighty issues. That the first hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday suggests the matter is being pursued with some urgency, too.
We will find out this week who is to be summoned to give evidence. An investigation into the science linking brain injury to dementia has been promised. As ever, the credentials and interests of those submitting will warrant close attention. The committee will issue its own call to witnesses but has also invited the submission of written evidence. That audible rumble rising from Wembley and Twickenham is perhaps the frantic scribbling of pens and clattering of keyboards. Presumably, the views of independent experts will also be sought.
But the question of what might be done - and who might do it - remains poignant. A report will be issued, probably in the next six months, and the government will respond - and that could be that. Or, if the horrors uncovered by the inquiry are such, they may propel the matter further up the political agenda towards legislation.
© Provided by The GuardianAn investigation into the science linking brain injury to dementia has been promised. Photograph: Pixel-shot/Alamy
Unquestionably, football is sitting more comfortably than rugby at this point. The repetitive heading of the ball is more peripheral to that sport than the repetitive slamming of body against body is to rugby. If Brian Clough had had his way, the ball would never have left the grass, but to reduce the amount of heading a player is subjected to across a career, whether in training or match, is relatively easy to achieve.
Not so with rugby and collision. The inquiry has named itself "concussion in sport", but one of the first duties an in-the-know scientist may perform is to recommend a changing the term "concussion" to "brain injury", which incorporates many other injuries, much harder to define or detect, beyond clinical concussion. The latest science suggests it is the frequency of the shaking of brains over a long period of time that plays a bigger role in determining future risk of dementia than isolated cases of concussion. Few, after all, are concussed by heading a football.
It is telling the DCMS announcement was quick to reference youth sport. This is where rugby faces the greatest threat to its existence. Society can handle the licensing of all manner of dangerous activities for adults, but one violation sure to elicit condemnation in the court of public or parliamentary opinion is endangering of children.
The vast majority of children who play rugby will not play enough in their lives to elevate their risk of dementia, but those early years will contribute, possibly decisively, to a heightened risk among those who go on to have long careers, especially at a high level. Some scientists have called for tackling to be banned in schools.
There lies the vulnerability. This is where easy legislation might one day come to pass. Depending on how late the age of earliest exposure is set, rugby could be finished by such a measure. That remains a way off yet, if it happens at all, but well might sport be feeling as if it is front of the headmaster. An expulsion from school would prove the beginning of the end for some.