Eddie Jones’s training methods will be at the top of the agenda at the board meeting between the powerbrokers of the English game amid an escalating row over the number of injuries suffered at his England camps, Premiership Rugby has revealed.
Premiership Rugby on Thursday expressed its concern at the number of injuries sustained in training – both with England and the clubs – after Jones hit back at criticism from Bruce Craig, the Bath owner. Craig had described the injury toll at his club as “totally unacceptable” with the England coach responding that the Premiership clubs have “no right” to tell him how to run his side.
The issue will be discussed when Jones’s employers at the Rugby Football Union as well as representatives from Premiership Rugby and the players’ union convene at the next Professional Game Board meeting in June. “Training is arguably a much more controllable environment whether it is club or country. Are we concerned about injuries happening in training? Absolutely,” said Premiership Rugby’s chief executive, Mark McCafferty.
“That is an area we think is more controllable and we should be able to bring those injury rates down in that environment. The PGB will meet again in June and no doubt it will be one of the top items. Training injuries are one of the things we should be able to bring down.”
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When Ben Te’o was ruled out of next month’s tour of South Africa on Tuesday, becoming the 15th player to suffer an injury on Jones’s watch, the spotlight on his notoriously gruelling camps intensified. Addressing the criticism on Wednesday, Jones hit back: “We prepare players for Test matches. I don’t think anyone at a club has the right to tell a coach how to train a Test team. I don’t have any concerns. We train appropriately for Test match rugby.”
An injury audit, commissioned jointly by the Rugby Football Union and Premiership Rugby and released in March, showed that the severity of injuries sustained in England training drastically rose during Jones’s first season in charge.
The Professional Rugby Injury Surveillance Project [Prisp] report showed that the “burden of injuries” – which takes into account both their frequency and their severity – more than doubled at England training in the 2016-17 season, compared with the previous campaign.
The same audit showed that 36% of injuries suffered across the English game, either with club or country, were sustained during training.
“We are concerned that injury rates are rising in general as we saw from the latest Prisp report,” added McCafferty. “We have worked very hard at the last round of reporting Prisp to develop a specific action plan.
“We have eight points within that action and one of those is injuries in training.”