Lipman's concussion diary shows the problem

By his own admission, Michael Lipman estimates to have been knocked out 30 times over the course of a 13-year professional career. During his last season in the Premiership, the former England flanker suffered five bouts of concussion.

- PETER JACKSON

The traumatic events of his final months at Bath paint a disturbing picture of a club captain considered by some as too brave for his own good.

January 25, 2009 at The Rec, Heineken Cup pool stage: Bath v Toulouse.

Seventeen minutes into the match, on a pitch reduced to a paddy field by hailstorms and teeming rain, Lipman takes the ball into contact and knocks himself out, the victim of an accidental clash of heads with a teammate.

The game is delayed for fully ten minutes. It takes the medics the best part of five minutes to bring Lipman round and another five of painstaking care to remove him from the pitch.

The blow leaves the Test openside no option but to withdraw from England’s Six Nations training camp on the Algarve the following week. He doesn’t know it yet but the blow will wipe him out of the entire tournament.

February 21, 2009 at The Rec, Premiership: Bath v London Irish.

Lipman is due to resume normal service in the back row. He has passed the cognitive test prescribed by the game’s governing body, The International Board, but, feeling less than 100 per cent, decides to subject himself to a physical test.

He asks Peter Short, Bath’s second row, to provide it. “I had him running to me and hitting me with a few tackle bags,’’ Lipman told me at the time. “I knew I wasn’t right. It’s hard to describe how I felt. Disorientated probably sums it up best.