Giants (a) Thursday

Quote: leeds owl "If you ask any of the full time lads that have moved up from part time status I'm sure they will tell you how good it is compared to digging a trench at the side of the road all week. The conditioning staff at Headingley want shooting if Singo is tired after having played his last game a week before. Training and rehab will be tapered to deliver optimum performance on match day, and a week to prepare should mean no player is physically tired come matchday. He may still have a nagging injury that he is struggling to shake off, and he may well ache a few days after a tough game, but to me tiredness is something a tennis player gets at Wimbledon when he has played 3 matches in 3 days in 90 degree heat on centre court, or an athlete who runs in the 10k one day and then goes out and competes in the 5k the following day. We are only a third of the way through the season, tired is something that a player playing parts of an 80 minute game should never be at this stage.'"

I see what you're saying, and you're right in many respects, but I always think this line of argument with professional sports people is missing something. The thing is that a "tired" RL player can certainly go out and do the job again for 80 minutes. Fine. But what actually matters is not their energy level vs the average man on the street, but their energy level vs their opponent. If the opposition forwards are, for whatever reason, a bit fresher, that will tell.

A grand slam tennis player has a slightly different position, for example, in that their opponent will also have played the previous rounds of the tournament in broadly similar conditions. This is why the top players will be concerned about finishing off their early opponents as quickly as possible. They do worry about court time vs their later opponents.

Doing the 5km and 10km double is a phenomenally difficult thing to do. Sometimes you will be helped by the fact that some of your key rivals will also have done it, but a 5km specialist will always be at an advantage. Some truly great runners (Tirunesh Dibaba being an obvious example in 2012, who I regard as one of the greatest athletes of her generation) have failed to accomplish it. For the record, nobody would accomplish it if it was the next day. There will generally be a gap of 3 or 4 days between the 10k final and the 5k heats, and a full week between the finals.