“…A number of studies have explored factors associated with injurious tackle-events in rugby league (King, Hume and Clark, 2012b;Gardner et al, 2015;Hopkinson et al, 2020). Tackle characteristics such as initial contact with the shoulder or mid-torso (King, Hume and Clark, 2012a;Gardner et al, 2015), head on head collision and the tackler twisting the ball carrier's legs (Hopkinson et al, 2020) were found to have the greatest association with injury. However, to date research in rugby league has mainly focused on the tackle-event in which the injury occurred (King, Hume and Clark, 2012a;Gardner et al, 2015;Hopkinson et al, 2020), with minimal consideration of what has occurred prior to the injurious tackle-event.…”