Chaos as Rugby Union rethink sparks burnout fears

If you can’t squeeze a quart into a pint pot, try a gallon. Last weekend’s announcement of a World Club Cup, following not so hot on the heels of World Rugby’s proposal for a Rugby Nations Championship promises a radical reimagining of the rugby calendar.

Which, quite frankly, is a mess. Yesterday, for the only time all season, the 10 Premiership clubs kicked off on the same day, at the same time. Last weekend all except two of them had their feet up as Bath and Northampton contested European finals in Cardiff. Those two competitions have boxed and coxed with the Six Nations and the Premiership Cup since the end of the autumn international period. Only at the start of the season has there been a run of matches in one competition.

Not so long ago there wasn’t a club competition at all. Sides played or didn’t play each other for reasons that were lost in the mists of time. A national knockout cup arrived in 1972 but the idea of an organised league was anathema to the amateur spirit that prevailed.

Only the media, it seemed, wanted to rank clubs in order of success. The Sunday Telegraph came up with a merit table in which they compared results between the leading English clubs, within their established fixture lists, and rewarded the most successful with a pennant to hang behind the clubhouse bar for a year.

The fans knew little about it and the players only marginally more. It was March before the Bristol team I played for were told that if we beat two of Leicester, Northampton and Coventry — all at home – and if other results went our way, we would top the merit table.

That was 1974. It took another 20 years for the RFU to sanction a league with home and away fixtures, just before the game went professional, while the play-off process was a 21st century addition. In the same time span, the European competitions have carved out a place in the season, the Anglo-Welsh Cup has come and gone and the Premiership Cup has slotted in between Six Nations matches.

And now, like the proverbial London buses, two more competitions come along at almost the same time. The Rugby Nations Cup replicates the aims of the World Cup in its intention to identify the best in the world while at the same time giving some meaning and structure to the summer and autumn internationals played in each hemisphere. Each result will count and the best two overall will contest a grand final.

The World Club Cup aims to do the same below international level. There will be eight qualifiers from Europe (the Champions Cup quarter-finalists), seven from the Rugby Pacific Championship and one team from Japan. The first two tournaments – in 2028 and 2032 – will be held in Europe, replacing the knockout stages of the Champions Cup and adding an extra week to accommodate the southern hemisphere teams. All this before the Premiership play-offs, the finale to the French domestic season and the southern leg of the Nations Championship.

So the bugger’s muddle continues. New competitions have to be fitted in or tacked on.Seasons fragment even more. All sense of narrative and continuity is shelved. Tacticians and conditioning coaches have to operate to ever changing parameters and the players quite literally don’t know whether they are coming or going.

Especially if they try to do the maths. They are already recommended to play no more than 30matches a season and mandated to have five weeks’ complete rest and a 10-week gap between seasons. If the French domestic season finishes in late June, the Nations Championship won’t end till the beginning of August.

By that reckoning, every other year the top players wouldn’t be available to their clubs till late September, before missing the whole of November for the autumn Nations Championship, and most of February and March for the Six Nations. They’d have to play extra matches every World Cup – the Nations Championship plan envisages a 24-team competition, accommodated by an extra knockout round, and they’ve already seen the Six Nations compressed by a week.

No wonder the reactions to the proposed competitions are mixed. Premiership Rugby are broadly in favour. “Obviously as part of EPCR (European Professional Club Rugby) we are supportive of the concept.” The Professional Rugby Players’ Association chair Christian Day calls the prospect “hugely exciting” but warns that engagement with the players and their representatives is “crucial in understanding any demands placed upon the players”.

At the back of everyone’s minds must be the frightening statistic from the US. The average career length of an American footballer is less than three and a half years. And that’s on a maximum of 21 matches a season.