Ireland won their third Grand Slam title and their third Six Nations championship in the last five years this month when they beat England at Twickenham, but while some Irish players went traveling after the win, the vast majority of their French and English counterparts went straight back to club rugby.
Rob Kearney, Conor Murray, Rory Best, Keith Earls and Peter O’Mahony all traveled to Dubai while some of their other teammates got a well deserved chance to rest and relax after a five game, seven week Six Nations campaign.
Iain Henderson and Jacob Stockdale were the only Irish players to start for their provinces last weekend as they played the full 80 minutes in Ulster’s 35-17 loss to Cardiff, however, 10 of the England players that started against Ireland started for their clubs while prop Mako Vunipola was named on the bench for Saracens.
This is how it ended up. Loads of variables, obviously. pic.twitter.com/l4eIHSmYri
— Charlie Morgan (@CharlieFelix) March 26, 2018
Meanwhile nine players that started for France in their loss to Wales also started for their respective club sides last weekend while Remy Gross, Cedate Gomes Sa, Wencelas Laureat and Sebastien Vahaamahina were the only starters rested.
According to Charlie Morgan in The Telegraph, before the Six Nations Johnny Sexton had played 435 minutes for Leinster this season while Owen Farrell had played 1084 minutes for Saracens, similarly Dan Cole had played 1070 minutes for the Leicester Tigers while Tadhg Furlong had played 644 minutes of club rugby.
The reason for the disparity between both sets is that the IRFU have the ability to monitor and rest players in given weeks due to their central contract system, while the English players sign separate deals with their individual clubs.
Meanwhile The Guardian‘s Andy Bull wrote in January that the RFU’s statistics show that 44 professional players have quit the English leagues because of assorted injuries in the last three years.
The RFU’s past two surveys of the professional game show that while the overall number of injuries decreased in 2014-15 and 2015-16, the severity of those injuries got worse.
They measure severity by the time it takes an injured player to play again. In both those two recent seasons the average was 29 days, which is within the RFU’s “expected limits of variation” but only just, and a record high since it started keeping track in 2002, when the average was 16.
