Smart phones impact rugby skills?

This is an unusual assertion...if true one would imagine it would show up in cricket first. Dr Sherylle Calder has warned England's Six Nations squad members to spend less time on their mobile phones as she believes it has a negative effect on players' skills and visual awareness. The South African visual awareness specialist, who was recently added to England's backroom staff, has worked in various sport codes across the world and says the decline in skill and visual awareness of pro-athletes over the past six years is due to constant staring at mobile screens. 'We have seen in the last five to six years when we assess elite players in different sports that there is a deterioration in skill and awareness levels,' said Calder, who worked with England's 2003 and South Africa's 2007 World Cup-winning squads respectively. 'When you look at your phone there are no eye movements happening and everything is pretty static. We are losing the ability to communicate well.' While England players won't be forced to discard or spend less time on their smartphones, Calder was optimistic that they will heed her advice. 'We can't stop them but we will teach them good behaviours. We've got time until 2019, that is our aim,' Calder explained. 'If you don’t see something, you can’t make a decision. So one of the skills we work on is being able to see, or pick up, something early. The earlier you see the more time you have to make a decision. That’s a trainable skill.' 'If you make every player make one decision better on the field, that could be 15 or 22 decisions. I said to Clive Woodward in May 2003 that the teams who made the most effective decisions were going to be the ones who win.'

 I think in rugby, your view is wider than in cricket. Where in cricket, you focus more in one specific area, so the effect is not as bad. In rugby, you are supposed to look up and around all the time and need to be able to identify space in a very short time (fractions of seconds). Again in cricket, you can take your time to see the gaps in the field and the movement of the opposition on the field is not as dynamic.

I actually read the same article in the paper earlier this morning and my first thought was that she was on to something there. For me it seems to make perfect sense.

 Seeing as how some old school forwards can barely walk and talk at the same time ,especially the enormous lumpen SA types wot used to grind Englishmen into flour to make their bread ,then maybe cellphone use is a bridge too far.Best leave all the talky ,talky stuff to the mouthy backs ,especially scrummies .

Social media plus all the electronic gadgets around are impacting every avenue of our daily existence.
Social get-togethers, for example, are becoming a thing of the past. 
Progress is fine but does tend to be overrated and anti-social in my view. 
Guess I am just too old to only make use of my thumbs.