WITH just three weeks of the regular season to go, the PRO12 is beginning to resemble the sort of near-perfect handicap race in which several runners are heading for a blanket finish. Half the teams in the league could make it into the top four play-off places, while eight or nine are in the running for the top-six finish that confers a place in next season’s European Champions Cup. We could hardly hope for a less predictable, or more exciting, climax to the campaign.

And yet, of course, the PRO12 is not meant to be a handicap. It should start from scratch, with each team having the close season to sort out their squad, and then - barring injury, of course - having all their players available to them for all 22 games. Or at least that’s the ideal. The reality, in this Rugby World Cup season, is that some teams have been without their best players for a large chunk of the autumn, and then again during the Six Nations Championship.

What’s more, when those players are released back to their clubs they are often too fatigued to play immediately, or below their best for a week or two if they do turn out. Everyone picks up bumps and bruises along the way no matter what level of the game they are playing at, of course, but Test matches are significantly more demanding than league games.

Taking those factors into consideration, we can say that the teams with most international players - and that includes Glasgow Warriors - have perhaps been at full strength for half of their games. In other words, those teams are being punished for their success in bringing through or recruiting international players. All the more credit to the Warriors, then, for the recent run of victories which has lifted them up to fourth.

It was back in June last year, at the celebrations in Glasgow’s George Square after his team had won the championship, that Gregor Townsend explained why it was better that his players did not get a long summer break. A couple of short breaks, he insisted, would ensure their conditioning did not drop off too much, and would enable them to return to full fitness more quickly.

Some of us thought then that, in such a demanding season, that lack of time off might catch up with a lot of players around now. But Townsend has been proven correct, and his squad look keener and sharper now than they have been at any point of the campaign.

Even so, no matter if the Warriors’ resurgence takes them all the way to a successful defence of their title at BT Murrayfield on 28 May, there is a growing feeling in Wales and Ireland as well as Scotland that the league has to change to enable its star names to play in more games. Crowds and television audiences fall by 45 per cent during the international window, PRO12 managing director Martin Anayi said last week. They are well aware that the league matches which take place during that period are contested by second-string sides on the whole - and yet the matches count for just as many points as the games when all the teams are at full strength.

There is no obvious or easy solution - there is a limit to the number of games that individuals can play, and that can be crammed into an already crowded season. But the status quo is not sustainable in the long term, and will be changed sooner rather than later.

And another thing . . .

An especially vicious act of foul play in Argentina last weekend has been punished particularly severely, with forward Cipriano Martinez of the Pucara club reportedly receiving a 99-year ban for kicking an opponent in the head during a league match. The prop - why are they always props? - was red-carded immediately for the assault, which happened as Juan Masi of San Albano was kneeling on the ground by the side of a ruck.

As usual, no sooner was the story announced than people on social media began to voice their approval. Quite right too, was the general message. There should be no room in the game for this sort of thing.

Of course there shouldn’t, but 99 years? For a single act, no matter how brutal? Yes, it was a serious assault, but we all know of cases of serious assault and worse where the sentence is nothing like 99 years.

Pucara, who officially have only confirmed that they have taken “appropriate disciplinary action”, are entirely within their rights to say that Martinez will never play for them again. But such a disproportionate ban might just provoke a wee bit of sympathy for the front-row felon. It could even make you hope he enjoys such a ludicrously long life that, at the age of around 130 in 2115, he dons his kit and toddles on down to the club on a match day, looking for all the world like someone who has just done his ten minutes in the sinbin and is desperate to get involved again.