'Player may have died from unrelated brain bleed'

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TRAGIC: Jordan Kemp was taken to Auckland hospital after his collapse but never recovered.

Northland rugby player Jordan Kemp may have received perfect concussion treatment earlier this year and died from an unrelated brain bleed, a former All Blacks doctor says.

The talented hooker collapsed during a game between his Otamatea Hawks side and Old Boys Marist in Whangarei on Saturday. It is believed he suffered a brain bleed after a clash of heads. He died in hospital on Sunday.

Kemp had been blue-carded under world-leading concussion rules earlier this season. That meant he had to see a doctor immediately after the game and get medical approval before he played again.

He did not play for five weeks after the concussion and Northland Rugby Union chief executive Jeremy Parkinson said he had played for the last six weeks "symptom-free".

Graham Paterson, who has worked for more than 25 years in rugby medicine and was the All Blacks' doctor from 2004-05, said there were three possibilities for Jordan's death, but the cause would not be known until after an autopsy.

"People can die from a one-off head injury and it might be that the post-mortem shows he's got a brand new brain bleed that killed him.

"He'd had a concussion that was treated perfectly and he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and [maybe] this had nothing to do with the previous concussion."

The next option was that the first head knock was more severe than first thought and a CT scan could have shown something more subtle, such as a small bleed, Paterson said.

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'Player may have died from unrelated brain bleed'