In Gordon D’Arcy’s column earlier this week he aired the view that Test match players should be involved in the United Rugby Championship (URC) interprovincial meetings around Christmas.
One of the points he rightly made was that rugby fans were denied the opportunity of seeing the two Irish No 10s, Leinster’s Sam Prendergast and Munster’s Jack Crowley go head-to-head in Thomond Park.
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In Leinster’s game against Connacht, Irish captain Caelan Doris, scrumhalf Jamison Gibson-Park, flanker Josh van der Flier, lock James Ryan and centres Garry Ringrose and Robbie Henshaw were also not among the starting team, although Gibson-Park came off the bench after 50 minutes for Luke McGrath.
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It was a well-supported match with the official attendance at the Aviva Stadium on December 21st listed at 33,963.
It leads on to the question about what matches players should play in and when they should be resting, how many matches should they play a year and how clubs prioritise their players and opponents.
This weekend all four provinces are resting as there are no URC matches, with the Champions Cup resuming next weekend after two rounds played.
Many people regard the load that professional players face as the number of matches they play over the course of a season. But research has shown that the term ‘load’ refers to a large number of disparate factors of which competing at the weekend in a Six Nations or URC match is just one.
In 2016 the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) published a paper on rugby player loads and listed 23 to which professional players are subjected. They ranged from training and playing matches to travel fatigue, performance analysis, media, drug testing, family pressures, fan obligations, agents and socialising. It also listed eating for body composition management and learning team tactics as load factors.
It concluded that load was a major risk factor for injury and managing training loads should be an important element in enabling players to perform in a fit state as often as possible.
It is straightforward for coaches to work out the amount of rugby they want their players to face. In this calendar year there are five international matches in the Six Nations, and nine British and Irish Lions matches between the end of June and beginning of August, including three Tests against Australia.
Overlapping that, Ireland will tour Georgia and Romania with dates yet to be fixed before the month-long autumn festival of rugby comes around again next November. In 2024 that encompassed four matches against New Zealand, Argentina, Fiji and Australia.
Add in two regular competitions, the URC, which has 18 rounds before a quarter-final, and the multi-pool Champions Cup running over four pool stages and four knockout rounds including the final. Those club competitions alone add up to 29 competitive matches.
For the national team captain, Doris, he could also expect to play in five of the Six Nations matches, three of the Lions tests against Australia and three of the Autumn Nations Series 2025 games.
For the BJSM study into player loads, 2014 season data was provided by Opta, a commercial sports data provider, and included players from both northern and southern hemisphere teams across all competitions.
Information was obtained for 2,348 players, of whom 673 played in at least one international over the period examined. Forty per cent of players appeared in 20 matches or more, and 20 per cent appeared in 25 matches or more. Fifty-six per cent of those who appeared in 25 matches or more appeared in one or more internationals. Only 5% of players appeared in 30 matches or more.
The point is that there are too many matches in a season – between club and international around 40 – for players to be able to compete in much more than half.
In the 2023-24 season Doris played in 13 international matches for Ireland and 15 club matches with Leinster for a 28-game total. The previous 2022-23 season he played 11 international matches and 13 for Leinster for a total of 24 matches.
Van der Flier has similar numbers. For the 2022-23 season he played 10 times for Ireland and 14 times for Leinster in 24 matches and in the 2023-24 season he turned out 12 times with Ireland and 15 times with Leinster for 27 matches. In both of those seasons the openside flanker played seven times in the URC.
More recent research in 2022 carried out at the University of Bath and funded by the Rugby Players Association (RPA) said players should be limited to 30 ‘game involvements’ per season to prevent a “significantly higher injury burden” in the following campaign. A ‘game involvement’ was understood as “any time spent on the field”, given “broader elements of load associated with matches”.
The study found that 31 or more match involvements in a season leads to a significantly higher injury burden in the following season.
Doubtlessly fans prefer to see the international players perform for their clubs and there should be an onus on management to make that happen, especially when numbers hit over 30,000 for the Christmas games at the Aviva.
But the question the four provincial coaches regularly mull over is whether they need those frontline players now to please fans, or to be available and healthy to play in the next World Cup.
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