The controversial 32-game limit for a Premiership player in a season is to change, the Observer understands. From 2019-20 elite players will be limited to 30 lots of 80 minutes or 35 involvements in a matchday squad, whichever comes sooner.
Previously the limit applied only to members of England’s elite player squad but now it is being written into the standard Premiership contract, although it is almost impossible for a domestic player to pass the threshold.
Talks are progressing well between the Rugby Players’ Association, the Rugby Football Union and Premier Rugby, through the Professional Game Board. The RPA has long bemoaned the 32-game limit as crude and arbitrary, too high to make a difference and unenforceable on those rare occasions a player approaches it. The proposed alterations would address some of those concerns.
They will come into effect with World Rugby’s new global calendar, in which the June international window moves to July. The PGB is still negotiating England’s domestic season structure round that but Premier Rugby’s proposal for a 10-month season has been dropped.
When the limit was first set in 2008, a “game” was defined as 40 minutes or more, which lent the policy some teeth, but over the next year the definition was changed to 32 lots of 80 minutes, or 2,560 minutes. Chris Ashton sailed through it in the 2009-10 season, playing 35 full matches for England and Northampton, but he was allowed to play on England’s two-Test tour of Australia because he was a winger and was showing no signs of fatigue.
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Another of the RPA’s issues with the 32-game limit is that it takes no account of a player’s position – 2,560 minutes for a winger is a different proposition from the same for a prop. It is also difficult to enforce because it must always approach towards the end of a season, when finals and Test matches heave into view. No player would accept enforced withdrawal from such career-defining fixtures.
In 2014, Chris Robshaw and Mike Brown passed 2,560 minutes for the season in England’s third Test against the All Blacks.
The limit’s enforcement will require effective management of England players throughout a season. The lowering of the limit to 30 games will not affect the majority, who tend to fall well short nowadays, but the adjustment to take in 35 matchday involvements is significant, particularly for front‑rows, who do not often play more than 60 minutes in a game. Dan Cole played in an astonishing 41 games in the 2012-13 season but fell 324 minutes short of 2,560. That would no longer be permissible.
Cole, who missed nine months of the following season with a bulging disk in his neck, went on the Lions tour that season. The Lions remains a complication, rendering player management throughout the season difficult with no guarantee of involvement for any individual in the most important tour any player could be selected for. Should a player’s game time in the domestic season be limited in case he is selected? And what if he is a surprise call-up?
The new agreement comes no closer to answering such conundrums and it remains a catch-all, regardless of a player’s position. It does, though, represent progress on the vexed issue of player welfare.