Compromise crucial for ABs
Player workloads must be managed if the All Blacks are to win their end of year tests
The truth no one wants to dwell on is that New Zealand's leading players could be involved in two minor car crashes in the next few months and it would be less traumatic on their bodies than the carnage that will be inflicted on the field.
The high impact sorts such as Sam Cane, Ardie Savea and Liam Squire will make around 220 tackles in the next 40 weeks and be involved in close to 500 high velocity collisions.
They will cover more than 200km at full pace game intensity and about the same again, if not more, in running metres at training.
They and many of their team- mates will clock in excess of 100,000km of air travel and spend close to an entire week in planes and almost half the year away from their own beds.
As big as most players are, as conditioned and resilient as they tend to be, they are still the same organic composition as the rest of us — built with soft tissue and bones that were not designed for the carnage they have to endure.
This is the modern rugby landscape — a 40-week marathon treated as a sprint, as evidenced by the fact that most of the country's leading players will be involved in brutal local derbies this weekend, knowing that in 36 weeks, they will face one of the toughest five weeks in recent All Blacks history when they take on Australia, England and Ireland on their end of year tour.
The demands are extreme. Too much maybe, but this is how the game turns the financial wheels and sustains itself, and the only way everyone — Super Rugby, All Blacks and provincial teams — can get what they need is to compromise.
And this ability to compromise on workloads, game time and rest periods for leading players is, unfortunately, one of the most critical elements of the high performance plan. If New Zealand can collectively get this right, they automatically increase the likelihood of their leading teams being successful.
More specifically, they increase the likelihood of the All Blacks being successful, as it is clearly going to take detailed and intricate planning to ensure the likes of Owen Franks,