Hugh MacDonald on Saturday: It is becoming increasingly clear that top-class rugby is facing a crisis that few seem willing to discuss. Rugby is simply now a game where injuries are taking an exceptional toll.

In the dog days of the sporting season, when sub-editors blow on fingers staved by the shutting of the transfer window and writers brush off their rugby cliches for a Six Nations runout, there is an affecting ritual in The Herald Sports Suite. We use this as our bonding time, though those Back4 boys can sometimes take this too literally. Rebuffed by increasingly irritated sub-editors, they find solace in doing interesting things with soft furnishings and being ambitious with spot lighting, all to lend "a happening ambience to the workplace". It's like Arden with Colin and Justin, without the sophistication.

Meanwhile, the writers toast their waffles (strangely, our writers do a lot of waffling) while the sports editor demands that the under-used editors tabulate the Bosnian Third Division West while translating it into Sanskrit and forming logarithmic formulae for points accrued.

Sated and somewhat exhausted by all this fun, the lads turn to me for a bedtime story before it's time to have a glass of milk, put our heads on the desk and gently slumber through the second edition.

I regale them with tales of my sporting past. They are, unfortunately, as brief as a Jane Goody lecture on thermonuclear physics.

There is a reason for this. My sporting career was marked by pace, willingness and a dedication to improvement. It was undermined, somewhat unfairly, by a complete lack of talent.

This almost imperceptible flaw was best shown in my rugby career, an era that lasted for most of first year at secondary.

It was not a glamorous option. In truth, in comparison to football, rugby was seen as not so much the poor relative as the mentally-challenged Appalachian cousin with freakish banjo skills.

In short, and in fat, in skinny and in lumbering, rugby was viewed as the sport for freaks. Taking in a catchment area of large swathes of the East End of Glasgow, the school had no shortage of potential recruits. I haven't seen so many different shapes and colours since the day after the wean ate a Plasticine rainbow.

The best rugby players, of course, had a form of psychosis. They were divorced from the reality of pain and, indeed, they suffered only from an inability to empathise with a human being wearing a different-coloured jersey.

I bowed out early. I figured that if I wanted to spend my Saturdays being jumped on by belligerent, shirty psychopaths I could simply head for the nearest public bar where under-age drinking was not so much condoned as actively encouraged.

My grim fascination with rugby has continued, albeit from the sidelines. The game has a capacity to thrill, particularly in Calcutta Cup matches. So today I will be plunked in front of the television where the only danger will be from contracting indigestion from the mince spouted on the telly.

It will be different on the park. It is becoming increasingly clear that top-class rugby is facing a crisis that few seem willing to discuss. Rugby is simply now a game where injuries are taking an exceptional toll.

I am not talking of the dreadful events in scrums that have cost youngsters life and use of limb.

I am not referring to freakish accidents that will occur in any contact sport.

I am addressing the slow, inexorable war of attrition that has shortened the careers of top players.

The Scotland injury list over the last few months has assumed such proportions that its unveiling should be accompanied by The Last Post. Chris Cusiter, Jonny Beattie, Simon Taylor, Ally Hogg, Jason White, Rob Dewey, Mikey Blair. . . they have all limped from the international arena with serious injuries.

Rugby players are getting bigger and faster. There is regular, serious contact between players.

Once wingers received the ball only in Olympic years. And then only once. Once there was so much space on the field, particularly late in games, that agoraphobics quailed at the prospect.

Now these human juggernauts crash into each other like some sort of Monster Truck extravaganza. The collateral damage is extracted in blood and sinew. Careers are being shortened, even written off.

So what can the game do to halt this trend? The answer may be simple. Nothing. There is evidence that hurtling strength of the modern game means injuries, particularly those involving ligaments, are inevitable. Certainly, the incidence may be reduced by cutting the fixture list. But rugby and its players may have to face the reality that American Football has accepted. That is, the game is tough. Careers are short. Live with it.

Or, instead, you can spend time arranging the soft furnishings in The Herald Sports Suite.