The head injury to Wales rugby player George North "looks set to bring a significant change to the way top-level rugby handles similar incidents as the game’s governing body raised the prospect of video replays for pitch-side doctors," according to Sam Munnery of the LONDON TIMES. Wales’s medical staff was "widely criticised for allowing North to rejoin the game against England after the wing suffered blows to the head in both halves of his side’s RBS Six Nations Championship defeat in Cardiff." Wales later admitted that it "made the wrong decision on the second of those incidents having not had a clear view of it but insisted that, had video technology been available, North would have been replaced." It "has prompted Wales to arrange for replays to be available" to its medical staff for the rest of its Six Nations campaign, but World Rugby on Tuesday took that initiative a step farther "by calling for the expansion of the use of technology only available to the television match official (TMO) at elite level." The int'l governing body agreed with the Welsh Rugby Union that "its staff had erred in allowing North to continue after the second-half impact with Jonathan Joseph’s boot but accepted that the tools available to the doctors at the highest level were inadequate" (LONDON TIMES, 2/10).
