Union must heed calls to give exhausted players a rest

By CHRIS LAIDLAW

The likely disappearance by New Zealand teams beneath the waves of the Super 12 may seem a ghastly failure, but it may also be a temporary blessing.

The two-week holiday watching others fight their way to the title is likely to be the only break the New Zealand players will get between now and the end of the season, more than six months away.

By the time the All Blacks straggle back home after the European tour, there are going to be some thoroughly burned-out bodies.

The pressure has been slowly building on this issue and the fact that people, including players such as Todd Blackadder, are now openly speaking out means it has finally come to a head.

Even the New Zealand Rugby Union, which until now has resolutely resisted serious consideration of the problem, is obliged to begin an analysis of the essential question: how much is too much?

It is a good question.

On the one hand we pay top players the equivalent of annual salaries with built-in bonuses of various kinds and we have a right to expect a full, annual performance in return for that.

Yet on the other, it is patently obvious that at the new levels of physical and emotional intensity at which players are obliged to perform, it is simply not possible to extract maximum value for 11 months.

Some would say the obvious answer to that is to negotiate, say, nine-month salary packages and let the players go their own way for the rest of the year. If only we could.

There are, unfortunately, two factors which prevent that.

The first is that if we did not pay the full salary, then someone else most certainly would, and the trickle of players out of this country would immediately become a flood.

Until there is an international accord on salary ceilings - a tall order indeed - things will remain that way.

Secondly, it is impossible to concentrate the amount of rugby now being played into anything less than a 10 or 11-month season.

Something has to give, and it looks like being the number of games the top players are obliged to play.

At the moment, we in New Zealand are on the horns of a dilemma of our own making. We are full members of the Tri-Nations and Super 12 competitions, yet we have the longest and most intensive domestic provincial competition in the world.

On top of that, we are obliged to go off to the Northern Hemisphere to play internationals at the end of each year.

In other words, the load on New Zealand's top players is greater than on any others. The Australians have no provincial competition and their players are refreshed by a three-month break in the mid to late season.

Is this the primary reason for the Wallabies' success? Very likely.

The NZRFU is flirting with the proposal of 30-man Super 12 squads to provide some strategic respite for the All Blacks, who do not get enough of a break at the beginning of the season.

It would be folly to imagine that it will make much of a difference.

Sooner or later, and preferably sooner, we are going to have to start a wider rationalisation of the New Zealand programme - and that's when the real debate will begin.