The mince-grinder of sporting success
The English Premiership season is drawing to its play-off stage and, appropriately perhaps, the one thing that can be said for those clubs involved [Wasps, Exeter Chiefs Saracens and Leicester Tigers] is that – over the course of the competition – there can be no dispute that the best four are those left standing. Allowing for the facts that, when the last survey came in, from a financial viewpoint there were only two Premiership clubs in the operating black and that the autumn and Six Nations ‘international windows’ inevitably cause serious disruption to club team selections, it could even be said that the Premiership is in pretty rude health.
Which is perhaps more than could be said for the players.
About four seasons ago somebody worked out that a rugby player’s average Premiership career longevity was approximately three and a half seasons and – if I’ve remembered it correctly – at the end of last term, never mind those who’d decided they were too long in the tooth to carry on, no fewer than twenty-four players retired prematurely due to injury (whether catastrophic or just cumulative wear and tear).
The attrition rate of the elite professional game is something that the authorities would dearly love to bury from public view and are certainly not doing enough to address. World Rugby is currently researching the best way to introduce a unified ‘global season’ (being cynical, virtually an eleven month playing cycle), which may press the right buttons for those missionaries seeking to spread the game and indeed both the leading international countries and club authorities but will do zilch for player welfare.
In The Rugby Paper last weekend, 34 year old Springbok legend Schalk Burger – still a good enough player that his current stint with Saracens could never be filed under the heading ‘veteran player heads for the sun to max out his pension by trading on his name in an inferior setting’ – made the case that, to stop its slide down the world rankings after over 300 of its players have left the country in the last eighteen months, South Africa should apply to join the Six Nations competition.
One of the main planks in his argument was that, time zone-wise, it made perfect sense and to an extent I can see where he is coming from.
However, in another – regarding player welfare – I definitely cannot.
Without making the traditional patronising ‘holier-than-thou’ (rugby versus football) comparisons – Moaning Minnie though he is, I could sympathise with Jose Mourinho’s recent complaints after Manchester United’s 0-2 defeat at Arsenal that his squad will be playing up to three times a week – both soccer and rugby have issues with player fatigue and related injuries.
These days many elite athletes train to the edge of what human beings can physically endure. Which is why in rugby’s case there are always so many of them either out for weeks at a time with serious injuries of one degree or another and – if you surveyed all the Premiership clubs – I’d estimate you’d find that at any one time at least fifty percent of all players making themselves, or being pronounced, fit for selection for any given match day 23 are carrying, or ‘managing’ injury niggles that (in perfect circumstances) might have been better ‘rested’ for a fortnight minimum.
And so we come to the business end of the Northern Hemisphere (European) season.
This coming weekend both the major European Cup competitions – the Rugby Champions and Rugby Challenge Cups – hold their knockout finals in Edinburgh.
Next up, the Premiership semi-finals and then final take place – as does the Pro 12 equivalent – on 27th May.
Less than forty-eight hours later the British and Irish Lions fly out to New Zealand and have to play the first game of their shatteringly-intense tour only four days after setting foot on Kiwi soil.
We can just be thankful that no players who were involved in the Premiership and Pro 12 finals will be allowed to play in it!
The fact is that – as the onward march of globalisation continues and inevitably the business imperatives (not least pursuit of the commercial dollars to be made) of the quest to promote and develop the cause of elite sports stand to the fore, as they always do – the ‘in the round’ interests of the ever-bigger, ever-fitter, ever more put-upon athletes who actually provide the entertainment and excitement upon which ultimate success, however that might be defined, will always depend are playing second fiddle, if not being ignored.
It’s a problem that is not going to go away anytime soon.
