This is a big week for rugby union and the Six Nations is only a modest part of it. The first Premiership game to be staged outside Britain is taking place in New Jersey on Saturday, with an American audience being politely invited to come and see how London Irish and Saracens compares with watching the New York Jets against the New England Patriots. To say a cultural collision looms is an understatement.

It is fair, too, to suggest the timing could have been better. It is not just that this historic occasion clashes with a moderately interesting fixture between England and Wales at Twickenham. The call last week by 70 “experts” for tackling to be outlawed in schools rugby attracted plenty of debate, none of it designed to encourage US soccer moms to steerBradley junior towards the muscular new sport on the block. “Where are your helmets, guys?’ will inevitably be the most-asked question Stateside this week.

Rugby union: talking points from the weekend’s Premiership action Read more

Amid the usual rejoinders about American football tacklers leading with their heads and the resultant extra potential for concussions, though, rugby’s rulers would do well not to sound complacent.

Had Leicester’s game against Exeter been happening across the Atlantic rather than on a cold Mother’s Day in the east Midlands, the American reaction would have been widespread horror. Let us just say there are a few key areas rugby union needs to get right before it can hope to sell itself compellingly to a market already familiar with big blokes running into each other.

The most obvious are the types of high hit with which Manu Tuilagi felled the Chiefs’ Phil Dollman at Welford Road. It should be stressed Tuilagi’s tackle did not result in a card or even a penalty but even Manu’s England team-mates, watching in Bagshot, admitted they winced when they saw it. James Haskell, musing aloud on the issue of what constitutes a dangerous tackle these days, put it perfectly. “The problem was he hit him so hard he went to wrap his arms around and the bloke had already folded like a deckchair on the floor. Why would you penalise a bloke for doing that? That’s an incredible shot.”

Incredible, yes. Good for the game’s image? Maybe not. In almost the same breath Haskell was rightly pointing out that teaching young kids the correct tackling technique at the right age is absolutely fundamental. “I think we are creating a game where it’s important young kids are taught to tackle properly and understand that rugby is a physical sport. Making rugby a non-contact sport … you might as well just forget it and disband it. I think we have to make a stand at some point. We are a contact sport and people are going to get hurt. As long as it’s not someone running around straight-arming people or blindsiding people trying to rip your head off, these things happen. We need to understand that.”

Squaring this particularly awkward circle is probably the key to rugby’s long‑term future, certainly as a 15-a-side sport with mass appeal and ahealthy reputation for safety. Haskell is particularly instructive on the subject as someone for whom tackling did not initially come easy. “I remember being taken down to Maidenhead RFC at five years old and not wanting to get wet, muddy and kicked in the face. I didn’t like tackling for a long time. When I got to Wasps at 17 I went straight to [the former back‑row] Joe Worsley and said: ‘Listen, I’m not being funny, I can’t tackle very well, you’ll have to teach me.’ We spent a lot of time working on it.”

As Haskell also pointed out, rugby league has recently adjusted its law on what constitutes a dangerous high shot; relatively speaking, it is still higher than in union but there has finally been recognition that heads and brains are not indestructible. In union, as Haskell confirms, the tackle height can vary depending on the desired outcome: go low and your openside may have a better chance to nip in for the kill; go high and you might just dislodge the ball or prevent the offload. Better the former safety-wise but most of the time there is insufficient time in which to make a choice.

So let us pray that, when Irish and Saracens take to the Red Bull Arena, the body count is not too excessive, the spectacle is halfway decent and, additionally, the scrums mostly stay up. If not, north American patience may not extend much beyond the half-hour. It would also help greatly to hire a decisive TV match official; American sports are used to in-play breaks but some recent delays for TMO referrals in rugby have made the notoriously stop‑start Super Bowl feel like the Olympic 100 metres final. To reiterate, this is a big week. Mess it up and the American dream will remain precisely that.