Peter Jackson’s column: Vernon Pugh was right, we’re playing too many Tests

Fifty years ago, Jack Kyle held the record as the world’s most-capped player with 46 matches for Ireland.  It had taken the good doctor ten years of almost unbroken service to play that many.
Taulupe Faletau has also played 46 times for his adopted country and it has taken him four years.  From that, it can be deduced that at least three times as many Tests are played per year now than in the mid-Sixties.
In recent seasons, the figure has been nearer four times more than the four-and-a-bit internationals they played per season up until the 1980’s.  England, for example, set new endurance levels with 17 Tests in 2003, from France at Twickenham in the February to the World Cup final against Australia in Sydney nine months later.
Wales flogged their squad through 16 internationals in 2011.  Should they, England or Ireland reach the last four this October, each country will have wracked up a minimum of 15 matches.
If ‘brutal’ has become the buzz-word used by the Welsh management to describe the fitness work being done at their Alpine base in Switzerland, then it is in keeping with the brutality of the Test arena.  As for the escalating number of Tests, well they, too, have become decidedly brutal.
The players, not surprisingly, have suffered the consequences with the rising danger of concussion driven home in the high-profile cases of Wales wing George North and England full-back Mike Brown.    Against that disturbing background, World Rugby announced on Thursday action on the vexed subject of player welfare.
Their new ten-point procedure revolves around what might be called the Ten Commandments with concussion ‘at the heart of the plan’.  They come with a warning of action against medical mismanagement although how punitive or otherwise that action will be is not made clear.
In outlining the urgent need for more on-the-ground expertise with effect from the World Cup this autumn, World Rugby ignores, perhaps conveniently, one of the root causes of the problem – the sheer volume of international matches.
Successive administrations have failed to grasp the nettle. Some 15 years ago, the late Vernon Pugh, arguably the most able chairman to run the governing body post-professionalism, talked about a limit of ten Tests per country, per year but never got round to enforcing it.
World Rugby’s chief medical officer, Dr Martin Raftery, describes player welfare as ‘the number one priority’.   The new measures, he claims, are ‘a significant step forwards for the continued protection and support for our elite players’.
No mention there about the one obvious way of raising that protection and support, reducing the number of international matches. Player welfare has not stopped Wales, for instance, cramming every November full of four fixtures, almost as punishing on the fans’ pockets as on those putting their necks on the line, literally so in the case of front-row forwards.
World Rugby is at pains to claim that injury rates are not rising in which event some of us must be imagining the contrary. Nowhere in their release on the subject do they as much as acknowledge that too many players are being driven into early retirement because of concussion with God-only-knows what effects in later life.
The list of those forced to do so in recent months is depressingly long – Cardiff Blues flanker Rory Watts-Jones, Ulster’s Ireland prop Declan Fitzpatrick, All Black prop Ben Afeaki and Newport Dragons centre Ashley Smith to name but four.
Last year’s list included Gloucester‘s former England flanker Andy Hazell and Connacht’s captain Craig Clarke, a New Zealander who wisely hung up his boots after suffering ten concussions in his last two years as a back-row forward.
While some will inevitably ask why the more stringent measures are only being enforced now, anything to minimise the risk is to be welcomed, no matter how belatedly.
Sadly, it will not bring back surely the most tragic victim of concussion, 14-year-old Ben Robinson.  His case has been well documented, how he took three blows to the head playing in an Ulster schools match for Carrickfergus Grammar against Dalriada, went back on the field, collapsed and died in hospital.
Meanwhile, the number of international fixtures as sanctioned by World Rugby keep multiplying. The All Blacks visit to Apia in midweek marked the first of more than 40 internationals over a two-month period leading to the World Cup.
No wonder the late Dr Kyle’s world record has more than trebled from 46 Tests to 141, as held by Brian O’Driscoll.
Barring calamitous injury, his total will be superseded by Richie McCaw and hiked to around 146 by the end of the World Cup – one hundred more than the highest figure in 1965.
The continuing failure of the game’s governing body to impose a limit on the amount of Test rugby demands such an unrelenting physical toll of the players that only those with phenomenal levels of endurance can keep going, year in, year out.