In 2020 Steve Thompson revealed he could not remember winning the Rugby World Cup and since then his case and others have been caught up in a warren of legal argumentThe Royal Courts of Justice are a warren,They were built piecemeal over 125 years of intermittent construction, wings were added, blocks were expanded and then joined by a web of twisting staircases and long corridors,You navigate your way to whichever corner of it you have business in by checking the tiny print on the long daily case lists that are posted in the lobby early each morning, when the building always seems to be full of people hurrying in the other direction,For the last three years, three separate sets of legal action about brain damage in sport have been slowly making their way through here, lost in the hallways,One is in football, one is in rugby union, one is in rugby league.

The same small firm, Rylands Garth, is behind all three.Sometimes these hearings take place in the modern rooms of the east block, where the carpet is peeling and the roofs are gap-toothed with missing panels, and sometimes they take place in the cold old stone rooms off the great hall, which are wood-cladded, and contain rows and rows of heavy leather-bound books.Progress is slow.Events often go unreported.The three cases are distinct but parallel.

The two in rugby have so many overlapping issues that it was decided they should be managed together.This was meant to streamline proceedings but in the end has meant they have become even more entangled.The league case has one defendant, the Rugby Football League, the union case has three, World Rugby, the Rugby Football Union and the Welsh Rugby Union, which means that everything, even the schedules, must be argued, and agreed, in quadruplicate.On Monday, it will have been five years since my colleague Michael Aylwin and I first reported that all this was coming.In the days and weeks after the story broke, more and more former players came forward to talk to us about what they were going through.

The 2003 World Cup winner Steve Thompson, Alix Popham, Michael Lipman, Dan Scarbrough and Alex Abbey all spoke to the Guardian about their diagnoses.And in the days and weeks after that, more and more former players joined them in the lawsuit.By the time the case reached the agreed deadline, more than 1,000 people had joined the two actions, 313 in league and 787 in union.They include an array of professionals and amateurs, internationals, club players, men and women, some have been diagnosed with probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), others with Parkinson’s or motor neurone disease.Some cases are mild, some are more severe.

They are all neurodegenerative.A lot of these men and women started counting their days as soon as their test results came back.Most of them still love the sport that they believe did this to them, what they want from it is a settlement that will provide for their future care, and some security for the families who will have to do the caring.The cases still haven’t come to trial.Truth is, they’re not even all that close to it.

One solicitor tells me he thinks the union case may get to trial by 2027.He says he’s optimistic.Other people say he’s overly so.Everything has been stuck in what’s called the case management phase, in which all the claimants and the defendants have to agree exactly how to go about structuring trials that, in rugby union alone, will involve three different defendants, several hundred claimants and several hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.In its worst moments, the proceedings are reduced to a long back and forth in which the barristers try to steer the judge, Senior Master Cook, to the correct reference in the correct bundle of evidence, like men arguing over the best directions to give a motorist.

In the beginning, every major media organisation had a representative in court,Nowadays there are often only two of us from the national media, and most recently it’s been just me,Interest has been flattened by the interminable delays and intricate arguments,The lawsuit has coincided with a series of changes in the game,Smart mouthguards have been introduced, contact training has been reduced, sanctions for dangerous tackles made more severe, a brain health service has been developed, World Rugby has just recommended a new change to the law about tackle height in the community game, to better protect the players’ heads.

World Rugby says it would be doing all this whether there was legal action or not.The effect is that outside the court, a lot has changed.In it, nothing much has.So the claimants wait.Some are disillusioned, others are angry.

“The other side are playing the defendant’s playbook of deny, deny, deny, delay, delay, delay,” says Popham, “they’re just kicking it as far down the road as they possibly can.” Popham is one of the angry ones.He thinks the defendants are “playing chess”.World Rugby denies this.From the press seats, it has felt like both sides have been kicking for position, each trying to manoeuvre the other into exposing a weakness they can exploit.

It was agreed early on that a small number of test cases would be tried on behalf of the whole.In union, this means that both sides are going to pick 28 test cases, and that group of 56 will then be reduced again to a pool of around 20 who will stand trial as representatives of the entire range of different characters, careers and medical conditions involved.This approach requires a degree of cooperation that hasn’t come easily to either side, despite Cook’s chivvying.During proceedings, he often has the air of a hungry man enduring a waiter’s explanation about the concept of the restaurant his son-in-law has chosen for a family dinner.Despite what Popham says, the delays haven’t all been caused by the defendants.

In fact, the defendants argue that the delays haven’t been caused by them at all.They blame Rylands Garth, and Cook has sympathy with their argument.There has been a long, ongoing argument about whether or not Rylands Garth has fulfilled its obligation to disclose all the available medical records.This dispute has gone on for more than a year, and in its most surreal moments has boiled down to arguments about the exact meaning of the word “all”, which Cook finally tried, and failed, to clarify by loudly explaining that “all means all”.The claimants argue that “all” is an impossible burden, because it would require them to provide every medical record since birth for every player, and point to the irony that the defendants themselves guard access to many of those very same records, which are held by the clubs the men and women played for.

They complain of being sent on goose chases after documents in foreign hospitals, detailing old STDs,The defendants argue back that it’s impossible to ask them to pick their 28 cases if they don’t have access to all the information,If, say, a claimant hit his head when he fell off a bicycle on holiday in Spain 30 years ago, the defendants rightly argue that it is relevant material,Rylands Garth is a small firm and has taken on an enormous job,Its KC Susan Rodway has compared it to rolling a boulder uphill, only to have the other side push it down.

But it’s true, too, that it has often felt like Rylands Garth has been running to catch up to the position it ought to have been in at the beginning of the case.It went into this expecting a settlement.Over time it has put together what it says is one of the largest legal medical teams in Europe, and has secured a lot of financial support from a litigation funder, Asertis, to cover the £3.5m cost of all the neurological testing it has done.But it feels like it has been laying the rails in front of it while riding the train.

But then you could say the same thing about World Rugby’s welfare policies.Rylands Garth’s methods came under public scrutiny when it brought a case for breach of contract against one former player, the England prop Will Green, after he withdrew from the litigation and was left liable for the cost of the testing it had done on his behalf.Both sides have public relations teams, and it wasn’t a coincidence that Green’s case, which ended with Rylands Garth being referred to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, attracted so much coverage.In their press releases the defendants often talk about how they, and the players, are all part of “the rugby family” and imply that Rylands Garth is not.It often feels like they would like to wedge apart the claimants and the solicitors representing them.

In court, Cook eventually lost patience with Rylands Garth and issued what is called an unless order.It meant the firm had to fully comply with disclosure, or many of its cases could be struck out.The deadline to do it has passed, but the decision is currently being appealed.That necessitated a new set of hearings and a new judge, who is due to provide his verdict in the next fortnight.He is the third judge involved in the rugby hearings alone.

The fourth, who will actually oversee the trial, will join next year.A spokesperson for Rylands Garth said: “The claimants look forward to the trial judge taking over case management in early 2026, ushering in the next phase of proceedings.”Meanwhile, the claimants, Thompson, Popham, Lipman and all the others, wait and wait, and want for the help they need.