Authorities need to look carefully at injury crises

Two Premiership clubs training together in October because of a lack of fit players can’t be right and those in charge of the game need to address the current injury concerns.

I’ve done it before in pre-season with a Championship club and it can work well with a controlled contact session and a training game but, despite the obvious links between London Irish and Harlequins, it’s a very strange situation for them to be training with each other in the middle of a season.

I’ve never heard of two clubs in the top flight training with each other in the middle of a campaign before and that shows you just how bad the injury situation is in the league at present.

It’s no wonder there are more injuries nowadays than ever either. I stood on the field at the Ricoh Arena on Sunday in a guard of honour for Wasps’ 150^th anniversary and I only retired 18 months ago but the players looked huge when you saw them that close up and heard the thud as they run onto the pitch.

The players are bigger than two or three years ago even, the contacts are more ferocious, the impacts on the body are greater and, therefore, there are naturally going to be bigger injury crises at clubs.

Fitness levels have also gone through the roof since I last did a fitness test as well and I tried to avoid them as much as I could. The level of intensity is incredible and the players have to work so hard to get to that size, so the authorities really need to look after them.

Some of it is bad luck but there are other factors such as overtraining and playing too many games and there’s no better argument against extending the season than this current injury situation as it’ll just dilute the product rather than enhance it if so many players are missing because they’ve been putting their bodies on the line every week.

If you ask any player who has retired from the game, they’ll tell you that it’s the intensity of training and recovery that retires you rather than playing games.

I was very lucky in my last couple of years at Wasps and few months at Newcastle that I had great coaches in Dai Young and Dean Richards who understood where my body was at and that knee and shoulder injuries meant I had to be managed carefully.

The best directors of rugby manage their players individually and work out how to get the best out of their players in a team environment and a lot of that is to do with workloads in training, rest periods and the mental fatigue factor as well.

Ironically, the reason I retired originally was because I wasn’t being managed particularly carefully at London Irish and there was serious pressure put on to train at an intensity that my body just couldn’t cope with at that stage in my career.

The toughest conversation I had as a player, and Dai also said it was one of the toughest he has had to have as a coach, was when he didn’t offer me a playing extension because he knew I needed a knee and shoulder operation and he couldn’t justify the amount of money he would’ve had to spend on me.

He wanted me to stay on as a coach but he said he wasn’t going to disrespect me by offering me half or a third of the amount of money I was on and it was a really tough decision but he got Jimmy Gopperth in, who was younger and better in my opinion, so he definitely made the right call.

I used to tell him on the training field whenever I was out there that I had one more year in me and I would’ve loved another year at Wasps but he did the right thing for the club. He told me I was going to dislike him for a couple of weeks but hoped I’d understand afterwards and I did. He had to take the emotion out of it and do the right thing for the club and he was dead right.

Wasps have one of the biggest injury lists at present. On average, Premiership clubs will have around a quarter of their squad missing through injury at any one time. Dai has spoken about having cut his squad from 45 to 40 because of an increase in wages, so if he has more than 25% of his players out, then he is going to be down to the bare bones.

They travel to Saracens on Sunday and that is always a humdinger. Sarries won comfortably at Allianz Park last year but the year before Wasps put over 60 points on them away from home and that won’t have been forgotten.

Saracens are unbeaten in their last 17 home Premiership games since Northampton beat them in March 2015, which is their best ever home run, so I’d expect a pretty rampant performance and a home win in the circumstances and it isn’t getting any easier for Wasps.

Leicester have had horrendous injury lists at various times in recent years as well and it can cost directors of rugby their jobs. It certainly didn’t help Richard Cockerill and Aaron Mauger last season.

Boards, as well as fans, do look at the figures and ask why the club isn’t top of the league when it’s spending so much, so injuries do cost coaches their jobs and you have to be a really good juggler as a director of rugby.

It has probably cost Leicester around half a million pounds a year to keep Manu Tuilagi and he’s started just 14 of the last 74 Premiership games in the past three and a bit seasons. That’s not the player’s fault but it’s a business decision.

Some people would say Manu’s not worth that money but Leicester don’t want to see him get fit and be starring for someone else because another club would definitely snap him up and they might get luckier with regard to him staying fit.

Clubs do have insurance against players getting injured but it’s still costly for both them and players. In every player’s standard contract in the Premiership there is a 26-week injury clause so if you’re injured for a day longer than 26 weeks in a 52-week period, then the club can terminate your contract or reduce your wages until you’re fit again.

I’ve seen it happen both ways where a club has opted to get rid of a player and when they’ve backed a player on full pay when they’ve been out for 10 months because it was one of their superstars.

Quins have perhaps the lengthiest injury list at the moment, which is why training with Irish has become a necessity, and John Kingston’s cause hasn’t been helped by one of his stars being banned for seven weeks for making contact with the eye area of Michael Paterson last weekend.

However, I think Kyle Sinckler has been very fortunate. If you look at some other cases where players have been found to have made contact with the eye area, there have been far lengthier bans. Chris Ashton got 10 weeks last year and Julien Dupuy was banned for six months for something not dissimilar back in 2009.

I think with gouging it doesn’t matter if the victim is injured or what your previous disciplinary record is like. It is a complete no-no. The low entry point for the offence is 12 weeks and there shouldn’t be any reduction in the length of the sentence because of other factors in my opinion.

I tried to avoid contact like the plague on a rugby field and didn’t feel the need to go around proving how hard I was, so I don’t necessarily get the whole confrontational aspect but he needs to work on his behaviour while he’s away as people now know he’s got a short fuse and can be targeted.