GLASGOW’s season may have ended a week early thanks to their PRO12 semi-final defeat by Connacht, but there is no denying the fact that the Warriors and every other player in the game are overdue a good break.

After playing their part in winning the PRO12 at the end of May last year, Glasgow’s Scotland internationals had little time off before going out to the national team’s pre-World-Cup training camp in the Pyrenees. It was soon time for Scotland’s four warm-up games, then the World Cup itself, then more club rugby before the Six Nations. After that tournament was out of the way, it was back to the climax of the league season, and some of the most demanding, high-intensity rugby of the whole campaign.

Of course, breaks for individuals were factored in, while some clubs ensured their whole squads had mini-breaks along the way. The Warriors, among other teams, believe that two or three short blocks of rest and recuperation over the close season work better than the traditional six- or seven-week summer holiday, and judging by the way in which their form improved towards the end of this season, they appear to have a strong case.

Certainly, it is easy to see why a couple of months’ lazing around on a beach somewhere is not the best way for a professional athlete to prepare for a new season. Yet, while the current preference for shorter and more frequent breaks makes good sense physically, at least at the professional end of the game, there may well be a greater risk of mental fatigue.

We all grew up with that long summer holiday - so long that we were bored well before the end of it. Bored with doing nothing, and keener to get back to school with every passing day.

And if you played rugby at school, you didn’t just have the summer holiday off, you had the summer term before it too. Rugby was for autumn and spring, then in the summer term it was cricket or athletics or whatever else took your fancy. No matter how physically demanding your summer-term activity was, it was still a proper break from rugby.

Contrast that with what it’s like today for the professionals. This season a Scottish pro would have been eligible for a total of more than 40 games: four World Cup warm-ups, five in the cup itself, five in the Six Nations, 22 PRO12 games (or 23 in the case of Glasgow), and six European matches. It would have been more had either the Warriors or Edinburgh reached the knockout stages of the Champions Cup or Challenge Cup respectively.

Granted, some of those matches overlapped, and there is a protocol in place which prevents a player from turning out more than five weeks in a row. And I’m not suggesting that pros should go back to what they knew at school.

But it is still a long and very demanding season, one which leaves precious little time for a player to develop an interest in anything else. Neither wonder that, while everyone is naturally keen to avoid injuries, so many of those who are ruled out for a short time come to see the enforced break as a blessing in disguise.

Because of the protocol, because of the clash between some fixtures, and because in any case players are only human and could not realistically take part in more than 40 games a season, some PRO12 matches this season were played out with what amounted to a second string. Taking nothing away from Connacht’s remarkable rise, the World Cup undeniably had an adverse effect on those teams such as the Warriors who had most players called up for international duty, and less impact on sides such as the Irish province whose squads were relatively stable throughout the PRO12.

The result was an unsatisfactory one, with every match counting for the same number of points no matter if it was your first-choice 15 or your second string that was out there. However, the alternative is if anything more unsatisfactory: to offer, say, only two points rather than four for a basic win in those games where front-rank internationals are unable to play. Such a system has been tried in the past, and all it does is devalue the competition by making games less meaningful and thus discouraging spectators from attending.

So we have conflicting pressures: an overcrowded calendar, and a justifiable desire to protect players from exhaustion. It is just one of the conundrums that Bill Beaumont and Agustin Pichot will have to confront when they take over as chairman and vice-chairman respectively of World Rugby on 1 July.

In his election manifesto, Beaumont has already stressed the need to sort out rugby’s global calendar and make some sense of the season, while he also said that “tournament scheduling must also serve players’ welfare”. But is it really possible to agree a worldwide structure for the sport while acknowledging the fact that our top players are playing too much rugby? I’ll let you know what I think in August, once I get back from the beach.