Terrible Fixture Planning Is A Blow To The Lions Tour

World Rugby needs to sort out a world rugby calendar and it needs to do it quick before the Lions Tour, and other tours, are ruined forever. The Aviva Premiership's fixtures for next season mean a huge clash with the historic tour.

With The Lions tours, like the Olympics, only coming round every four years a player has to hit form at the right time to be in with a chance of making the historic team. It's all too easy to go your whole career without making one with fluctuations in form and fitness.

Considering the importance of the tours and the difficulty to get on them you'd have thought that rugby would do all it could to make sure that the best players get to play in them but instead the Aviva Premiership and Top 14 fixtures means that is unlikely to happen.

When The Lions head to New Zealand next summer the squad will be without anyone involved in the Premiership final at Twickenham as that match is played only a week before the first test with the Top 14 going well into mid June.

That news means a whole host of stars could be missing for the beginning of the tour and not giving the players involved enough time to bed in with their new teammates ahead of a series against the world's best team.

If the Premiership final was a repeat of this year's Exeter Chiefs vs Saracens affair then the squad, likely to be managed by Warren Gatland, would be without a large number of England's Grand Slam and Australian series winning squad.

The names who would miss out include Maro Itoje, Owen Farrell, Billy and Mako Vunipola and Jack Nowell whilst Toulon reaching the Top 14 final would see Leigh Halfpenny miss out.

Won't someone please sort this mess out?