Premiership Rugby will not bring its play-off final in 2021 forward to allow the British & Irish Lions to train for a week before flying out to South Africa, but its chief executive, Mark McCafferty, says English clubs were not trying to squeeze the tourists out of the fixture schedule.
Future Lions tours will be cut from 10 to eight matches and without a training week for the entire squad, they will have little time to blend players from four countries. John Spencer, the manager to New Zealand last year, has said he is concerned about the future of European rugby’s leading brand because the tight schedule would turn a tour into a mission impossible.
“The Lions will always be part of the rugby schedule, for sure,” said McCafferty. “It is a question of trying to help them and we have been trying to do that. We want them to engage more fully with the clubs and not just see themselves as partners of the unions. That is not easy, sometimes, but is definitely the way forward.
“There is no way that the Lions will never form part of the system, but there has to be sufficient preparation in advance of a tour. We had a ridiculous situation a few years ago when players appearing in the European Cup final that weekend were dragged away on the Monday to a Lions do. It led to a conflict and the day before the Lions left for Hong Kong in 2013, we were resolving an issue over insurance.”
A number of club officials said after last year’s tour that the length of a Lions tour had to be cut in the interests of player welfare, threatening to withhold their players if the schedules were not curtailed. They also wanted a hike in the £60,000 they received for each player.
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“It is not all one-way,” said McCafferty. “We need to become more empathetic in some areas. It is a complex issue and people have strong views about it, but I am confident that we will move on and that things will improve.”
The Premiership season in 2020‑21 will be played over 10 months, from 12 September until 26 June, the date of the final at Twickenham. The campaign will be 17 days longer than the current one, but the slack will be used to reduce the number of overlaps between league and international fixtures rather than accommodate the Lions.
“Is it possible to see a time where there are no overlaps? Yes, but it would require changing competition formats and we are not ready for that,” said McCafferty. “What we are seeing in all this is that the game is continuing to evolve.”