Much has been made of player burn out and its prevention in the professional game.

Australian elite rugby players are restricted to a number of matches that they can play per year. No doubt a few of the under achieveing nations at the world cup will or have pointed to "number of games or player fatigue" as reasons, but you have to ask why?. New Zealand, gave a number of  players a late start to the 2007 Super 14 (much remains to be seen as to what Fox's response is to that), South Africa (wisely?) gave their players a break during the Tri Nations (Fox might not be too happy again????).

This Saturday coming December 1st a Test match takes place, not a friendly but a test match between two teams who were at the RWC, two teams that are not packed full of professional players, the match is an ENC Cup  Div 1 fixture, Portugal v Romania in Lisbon.

These are the same players who played just one test less than New Zealand or Australia at the RWC, had played tests when other nations such as Wales and France were "resting" their top players and are still playing Test Rugby in December.

So that you can get a feel for Portugals schedule this year they played their opening match of the year against  Morocco in Casablanca in a WCQ Repechage leg on January the 20th. Portugal remember, are a mixture of amateur, semi professional and professional players.

There are some professional players and administrators who need to take a long hard look at their output per season. Without going through the numbers too comprehensively I would imagine that there are players in the Australian RWC squad (and others) who would have played the following amount of matches:

1. Super 14: 8 - 10 matches
2. Test series and tri nations: 5 tests
3. RWC: 3 matches

In that scenario out of 52 weeks that is 18 or so matches, I used Australia as an example, for New Zealand it could have been a lot less match time in the case of one or two players. For what benefit?

Are the rugby fans and sponsors getting value for money out of the above scenarios? Not really.

If I were Fox Sports walking into the next round of negotiations with the tri nations teams, I would be offering a 3 year contract that did not cover RWC years, why would you pay a large amount of money to screen an incomplete competition 25% of the time?

The questions for us are, when does protecting the players from the rigour of the professional game actually cross the line and prevent them from playing to the best of their ability? When do such restrictions damage the games reputation with sponsors and media companies? And most importantly when do such restrictions restrict the development of the game at grass roots level?

Portugal and Romanian players need to be applauded in their commitment to Test match rugby this year. Other nations in the rugby world should take note.

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