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Author Topic: What will 'summer rugby' look like?  (Read 94 times)

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deadlyfrom5yardsout

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What will 'summer rugby' look like?
« on: Monday 08-Jun-2020, 09:46* »
Bit of a long read but some good stuff in here..




What can we expect if the northern hemisphere club season is moved to run between January and September?


Charlie Morgan (Telegraph)
 
It feels ironic, yet amusingly apt in this part of the world, to be discussing the potential consequences of a move to ‘summer rugby’ after a June weekend that produced blustery winds and rain around the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Shifting the professional club season to a January-September schedule will be no guarantee of bright, unbroken sunshine and high temperatures for the final three months of every campaign.

Sale Sharks’ last Premiership victory, back on May 26, 2006, was sealed by a 45-20 win over Leicester Tigers in a sodden Twickenham final. Last year, the Met Office registered 94mm of rainfall in the UK between August 1-17. Although the summer of 2019 was the twelfth hottest on record since 1910, it was also the seventh wettest during that 109-year period.

 
Still, we can reasonably expect, with all the confidence of any British barbeque-planner, that a January-September season – clearing the way for cross-hemisphere Test matches at the end of the year – will likely be warmer and drier for avoiding fixtures in November and December.

One of Alex Goode’s most assured performances for England came on a drizzly day at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium in 2013 as Ireland were beaten 12-6. The full-back tends to enjoy mild afternoons in May, though.

Snaking behind breakdowns and flitting between first- and second-receiver, he is precisely the sort of player who can torment weary defenders. He shone for Saracens against Exeter Chiefs in the 2016 Premiership decider:


Two years later, Mark McCall’s men overturned Wasps in a sweltering semi-final shoot-out…


…before ousting Exeter again. Temperatures touched 26 degrees Celsius. Goode was named man of the match:


Fourteen months ago, Saracens beat Munster in the Coventry sun and Goode thrived again:


The 32 year-old favours a mooted restructure of the season. Interestingly, his first argument confronts World Rugby’s penchant for tweaking legislation in order to artificially hike ball-in-play time and enhance the spectacle.

“Law changes make a complex game worse and put more people off,” Goode says.

“A quicker game is easier to understand and, in warmer weather, players will have to change.”

As others have argued, it may be challenging for rugby union to abandon its traditional position in the calendar and compete against other summer sporting events for eyeballs and interest.

Administrators and marketeers will need to be shrewd, but Bristol Bears have shown what is possible as far as raising awareness and mobilising a support base with conviction and creativity.

For a start, as Goode proposes, pleasant conditions and long evenings will give clubs more scope to invite younger supporters and stage junior initiatives around games. Here are a few more questions to consider.

How will teams prepare for the heat?
A temperature of 38.7 degrees Celsius was recorded at Cambridge Botanic Garden last July. Matt Toomua’s tales about an Australian pre-season are worth bearing in mind for northern hemisphere clubs.

“Surprisingly we rarely play in very hot conditions in the southern hemisphere,” explains the Australia playmaker, who joined Melbourne Rebels from Leicester Tigers last May.

“There are a couple games at the start of the year that are hot, but because the majority of our games are 7.45pm kick-offs, the weather is usually cooler by then. One of the hotter games I’ve played in was in France at 3pm when it was around 30 degrees.

“That being said, early in the season, particularly in pre-season trials we get some brutal conditions down here. We had a few trial games in Darwin and the weather was about mid 30s with 80-90 per cent humidity.

“We had water breaks every 20mins and at half time we were having ice baths – boots and socks on, change of jersey and shorts – and Powerade slushies to cool our body temperature before running out again. I lost about four kilograms in 50 minutes of play. The bigger blokes lost closer to seven or eight kilograms. So pretty full-on.”

Exeter’s notorious conditioning sessions at Exmouth Beach could become more beneficial.

“There is a big risk of players cramping because of under-conditioning and dehydration,” Toomua adds. “But this can be trained for. We often do a lot of sand conditioning after sessions here at the start of the year to help our calf conditioning and limit cramps.”

Peter Tierney, a physical performance coach at the Football Association with five years as a sports scientist at Leinster on his CV, suggests that medical staff will need to educate coaches and players about the heat-stroke and other associated health risks.

Mid-season heat-acclimatisation camps – think of England’s annual trip to Portugal before the Six Nations or their gruelling sessions in Treviso prior to Rugby World Cup 2019 – would become more common for squads to maintain adaption levels.

Nutritional strategies such as half-time refuelling will be considered, as will players’ ability to “maintain high fat mass”. Tierney expects the consequent effect on the “collision aspect of the game” to be monitored. “I think there will be a lot of players needing to experiment with what their ‘best’ weight is,” he says.

What will the games look like?
Every four years, Rugby World Cup warm-up matches offer the northern hemisphere a rare glimpse of international rugby in early August. They are usually difficult to evaluate and almost eerily disjointed because teams meet at different stages of their physical and tactical preparation.

Following his team’s 57-15 loss at Twickenham last year, for example, Joe Schmidt admitted that his squad were “under-done” and “heavy-legged”. England looked slick, but it was difficult to read too much into a bullying display.


In European club rugby, July and August have been mainly for pre-season run-outs. There will be an element of guesswork as to how coaches will approach summer games. Opta, part of Stats Perform, crunched numbers from all games in the Pro 14, the Top 14 and the Premiership since the start of 2015 and broke them down by month.

The figures show that sides have struck the most kicks from hand in January (22.4 per match) and February (22.6). If the northern hemisphere aligns more closely with the southern hemisphere template, there will still be rainy arm-wrestles.

Domestic club matches in April produced the most passes per team (144.6 each game) with May yielding the most offloads (11.1). These months were the only ones to return an average of over 24 points per team, with 2.9 tries each also an annual high. They were also clear leaders for running metres, April returning 415m and May 418.6m.

The glaring caveat is that each campaign brings some meaningless, chuck-around fixtures in spring – whether or not the competition is ring-fenced. However, that must be mitigated by high-stakes play-offs occurring at a similar time of year.

Matt Egan, first-team performance analyst at Bath, highlights that points per game (50) and tries per game (5.97) over the 2018-19 Premiership season were higher between August-September and April-May combined than they were between October and March, when the respective averages were at 42.6 and 4.42.

Using different parameters, with ‘winter’ defined as the start of the season until the end of March and ‘summer’ constituting April and May, Ross Hamilton of Elite Talent ID examined the same campaign and found that ball-in-play time rose from 37 minutes and 20 seconds per match to 39 minutes and 51 seconds per match.


The work-to-rest ratio increased from 0.63 to 0.67. Offloads were up to 18.8 per match from 16.7, as well.

Joe El-Abd, now manager sportif at Oyonnax, was seconded to England from Castres to coach defence for the Barbarians match last year.

He points out that French clubs encounter 35-degree heat in pre-season, which is why mental conditioning is vital. When the sun is a “shock to the system”, players can become seduced by the conditions and fly off script. Of course, sweat has compromised handling in the past and contributed to a Rugby World Cup full of kicking.

Cheetahs’ stint in the Pro 14 has been a fascinating case study. This season, exacerbating a trend of their involvement in the predominantly northern hemisphere competition, they have won all five of their games in South Africa and lost all eight of their games in Europe.


“It is difficult when you are training on dry surfaces in 30 degrees not to throw the ball in training,” admitted coach Hawies Fourie last November, before revealing that Cheetahs had been wetting rugby balls in buckets during training in the Free State to replicate conditions expected in Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

Adapting at short notice is so hard. At least most northern hemisphere clubs will be in the same boat when it comes to climate.

Will the game be ‘depowered’?
A nagging reservation for some critics of an overhaul is that the scrum will become obsolete and the sport will finally shed the game-for-all-shapes-and-sizes attraction and become a sport for homogenous athletes.

It is true that some tight-five forwards may need to adapt and shed mass. The greater prominence of “hugging” – presumably binding in contested scrums and mauls – in rugby union over the 13-man code is one of five reasons given by an official World Rugby document explaining why rugby league players are less at risk of heat illness.

Harlequins hooker Joe Gray is not exactly a slacker. He has spent lockdown doing 200 ‘up-downs’ every morning – with 400 on the 49th day to hit a round total of 10,000 – in order to raise money for Bowel Cancer UK after his father, Paul, died from the disease in March. Still, grating in intense heat is not easy.

“It’s definitely a different challenge compared to the majority of the season,” Gray says. “That is mainly because of the heat, but also because games seem quicker on summer days… both of them together make a deadly combo for most front-five forwards!”

Again, it should be stressed that January, February and March would constitute the start of the altered northern hemisphere season. And, anyway, South Africa’s forwards did not look particularly depowered by the oppressive heat of Japan. Aled Walters helped the Springboks shed weight. Their scrum did not look weaker for that.

“I’m sure modern conditioning techniques will get around things,” says El-Abd when asked about the possibility of players slimming down. “That way, [forwards] can maintain weight and meet those cardiovascular demands.”

Brawnier individuals may also be helped by law 5.9, which allows referees to permit one-minute water breaks mid-way through each half “when weather conditions are exceptionally hot and/or humid”.

These will not do much for the staccato rhythm that, in the eyes of Eddie Jones, has seen rugby union replicate the anaerobic tendencies of American football by providing recovery periods slanting towards power-athletes and collision-winners. A sense of flow could be harder to come by.

“In terms of tactics, [heat] has never really affected things too much as we always have drinks breaks,” Toomua says.

“To be honest this is one of my gripes in rugby, that we allow teams to slow the game down and recover. I think we could open the game up a lot better if referees were harder on this, and players were forced to play under fatigue. Rugby league does this better than us.”

Can grounds cope?
Overly hard and bare pitches would be far more of a problem were the community game to move. Professional clubs should be able to water thoroughly and produce pristine pitches throughout the summer months. Mercifully, we can anticipate fewer stodgy matches at The Rec.

James Keywood, assistant pitch manager at Leicester City, previously worked as Welford Road’s deputy head groundsman. He underlines the evolution of sports turf and foresees fewer issues with lawn diseases between June and August.

Where rugby clubs will have to be canny is with their relaying process. According to Keywood, new surfaces require longer to “grow in” if planted after September. Although football stadiums and major venues can make use of undersoil heating and grow lights, very few rugby grounds departments can afford such resources. Patience and alternative options for pre-season might be necessary.


El-Abd’s Oyonnax use an artificial pitch, which is watered to help prevent friction burns. Similar ones in England are being monitored carefully by the Rugby Football Union’s injury studies. Whatever the set-up, grass, hybrid or rubber crumb, footing will be firm in summer rugby.

What about any other changes?
Goode, Tierney and Toomua all advocate later kick-offs, perhaps at 5pm rather than 3pm, as a means of off-setting heat stress. Inevitably, television operators will have a significant influence.

Tierney wonders whether World Rugby, currently looking at reducing the number of permitted replacements in order to increase the level of fatigue in matches, might examine ‘rolling’ – effectively unlimited – interchanges as a contingency.
 
Finally, separating the professional and community seasons might allow for players to move between the two. Promising youngsters on the fringe of first-team professional squads could still be loaned out to National 1 or 2 outfits.

More experienced figures, perhaps returning from injury, might strengthen links with community clubs with the odd run-out. This happens without fuss in Australia and New Zealand.

With smaller Premiership squads and fewer full-time professionals, National 1 and 2 might become a more fertile ground for scouting, as well. The competitions could certainly be afforded a more visible shop window between September and December.

In such a delicate time, the commercial repercussions must be weighed up carefully. In England, anyway, it appears as though Covid-19 will bring about a late start for next season – we cannot accurately call it 2020-21 if the delay drags beyond January – which appears ripe to test a revamped schedule. The least we can do is keep an open mind.


 

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