Players
We spoke to elite players throughout the global game to find out what they think of today’s game, what they’d change and the burning issues for those at the coalface
OUR GAME. It demands talking about. There’s always so much going on. There’s usually some unifying discussion point – something to rail against or lend weight to. And it’s a sport that, on any given day, can be deemed too prone to tinkering and change or in need of an overhaul.
It really can be tiring to consider, but perhaps that’s because so much of us do this as a thought exercise. We’re role playing. We all love a ‘what if?’ in rugby.
So we set out to ask what players think, in several different pockets of the global game. In years gone by we’ve done a ‘Players’ Issue’ where we sent out questionnaires, months in advance, and took on wrangling whole swathes of an elite echelon. However, we’ve all done surveys and censuses. How often did you tick your way through those without a pause? This time we decided to grill eight players from several groups – three Gallagher Premiership players (one very young, one late 20s and one veteran), an Irish provincial stalwart, a
South African professional based at home, a women’s Test player, a freshly retired Top 14 star turn, and someone with years of playing in the pro game out in Japan. Our intention: to see what talking points they raised, what they agreed on and what they pushed back on. All of it anonymous.
What we found were a few rallying issues and some we hadn’t even considered. At the heart of it all are eight top-end players who love this sport, want to protect and cherish their peers and the game, but who also wish to see it do better. This is what a panel of the game’s finest think about rugby...
CONTACT TRAINING LOADS
One topic of discussion that came up several times with players was that of training load – and in particular how much contact training is done. You may know that directives came in not so long ago to cap the amount of what pros cheerily discuss as ‘bone on bone’ contact training. Think of it as live, game-type scenarios where players go full contact. The intention from the game’s custodians was to really reduce the amount of body-breaking done before games. We were told back in 2021 that 15 minutes per week of full-contact training would suffice, as well as 40 minutes of ‘controlled contact’ (using shields and pads at reduced speed), and then 30 minutes a week of live set-piece work for the forwards to scrum and maul it out together. But as one forward with a decade of experience at the sharp end of English rugby tells us: “No one can actually tell me or you what a ‘collision’ is...” He goes on, “We had a guy at one of my clubs who r
