Ben Earl has called for a change to the Nations Championship format after England’s “brutal” schedule in the summer leg of the inaugural competition.<\/p>\n
England had to play three Tests in three different continents on successive weekends and accumulated 25,000 miles of travel.<\/p>\n
Victory over Argentina on Saturday keeps Steve Borthwick’s team in the hunt for a place in the final on 29 November at Twickenham’s Allianz Stadium.<\/p>\n
However, four long haul and four short haul flights in the past four weeks have contributed to players losing sleep and a reduced training schedule.<\/p>\n
“It’s been brutal, there’s no two ways about it,” England number 8 Earl said.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been speaking about it \u2013 why would we not all be playing in one country? So you just don’t travel, you go to one nation and have that festival feel.<\/p>\n
“I’m not paid to make those decisions but it has been tough. It’s been tough coming at the end of what’s been quite a long season anyway for most of us.<\/p>\n
“It’s been back and forth, coming back to England, seeing your families and then going away again.<\/p>\n
“It has seemed a bit weird but it’s just something we’re going to have to get used to because I think it’s just the beginning.”<\/p>\n
The competition resumes later in the year for the autumn leg with England next in action against Australia on 8 November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ben Earl has called for a change to the Nations Championship format after England’s “brutal” schedule in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":535938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-535937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}