With player welfare supposedly at the forefront of everyone’s minds, who would believe the way international rugby tours are structured nowadays?
Why would you expect a squad of players, who have just finished an eight-month season, to travel across the world, have a few days training and then straight into what is still the most physically and mentally demanding embodiment of the game, international rugby.
The reason that tours used to include a number of fixtures against provinces or county sides was partly to enable players to acclimatise to conditions that they were not accustomed to pla...