England number eight Ben Earl has put a figure on what the Nations Championship opening block cost its players: three Tests, three continents, three straight Saturdays and roughly 25,000 miles.
"It has been brutal, there is no two ways about it," Earl said after England closed the July window with a 31-24 win over Argentina in Santiago del Estero.
England opened at Ellis Park in Johannesburg, flew home to face Fiji in Liverpool in a fixture Fiji hosted in the northern hemisphere, then flew to Argentina. Four long-haul and four short-haul flights in just under four weeks.
Earl has a fix in mind, and it is not a small one.
"We have been speaking about it, why would we not all be playing in one country? So you just do not travel, you go to one nation and have that festival feel," he said. "You come to Australia, South Africa, wherever, and there is so much rugby going on. How cool would that be?"
He was careful about where the decision sits.
"I am not paid to make those decisions but it has been tough. It has been tough coming at the end of what has been quite a long season anyway for most of us. It has been back and forth, coming back to England, seeing your families and then going away again."
The cost showed up in preparation. "You just do not do as much training. You train a little bit later in the week and you train harder, closer to the game," Earl said.
He does not expect it to change soon. "It has seemed a bit weird but it is just something we are going to have to get used to because I think it is just the beginning."
The competition runs 12 teams, six from each hemisphere, with every side playing all six opponents from the other hemisphere once across three rounds in July and three in November. It is now paused until 6 November and finishes with a three-day play-off event at Allianz Stadium, Twickenham, on 27-29 November, the top-versus-top final on the Sunday.
Not every squad drew the same itinerary. Wales went Cardiff to San Juan to Durban, Scotland went Cordoba to Pretoria to Edinburgh. Ireland avoided the worst of it by insisting their Japan fixture be played on neutral ground in Newcastle, New South Wales, rather than adding a Tokyo leg to a schedule already taking in Sydney and Auckland.
The criticism is not all about air miles. Springboks coach Rassie Erasmus, speaking before the tournament began, questioned the premise rather than the logistics.
"We have never played a competition with the Springboks apart from maybe the World Cup, where you get log points for Test match rugby," Erasmus said. "I do not think we really see this as a competition. We see this as the next Test match and the next Test match."
He went further on the scoring system. "If you only go full out to try and win this, in all honesty, probably not the thing that most people want to hear, but we want to beat England, Scotland and Wales, and I think they want to do the same with us. Going for bonus points and those things. I do not know if that is really Test match rugby."
The defence of the format has come mostly from outside the game rather than inside it. Guardian columnist Robert Kitson, who has been critical of the tournament on other grounds, conceded the July rounds worked for the audience, writing that the format had been enjoyed by sofa-bound viewers with all games freely available on ITV and something in it for pretty much everyone. FloRugby writer Joe Harrington made the structural case, arguing the competition finally gives the international game a visible ladder and a far more coherent global structure than rugby has ever had.
Others were blunter in the other direction. Guardian writer Michael Aylwin suggested the schedule made World Rugby claims about player welfare hard to take seriously, writing that the next time the governing body raises welfare as its top priority, the reply should simply be Nations Championship.
After three rounds the hemispheres are level at nine wins each. New Zealand and South Africa are the only unbeaten sides, and because both are southern they cannot meet in the final.
World Rugby has not publicly responded to Earl comments. The November block is largely single-hemisphere and a far more orthodox shape, so the argument about July has until then to find an answer.
