"Mentally you are 22 weeks away from home," says Bryan Redpath as he explains the challenges facing those of his Gloucester players who are returning from the World Cup. "Then you go full time into your bread and butter and that's not easy.
"The reason I gave all our World Cup players a week to 10 days off was to say: 'Right, for the last 12 to 16 weeks you've been caged up, told what to wear, where to go, what to do. Then you come home to the missus and ask her what you're eating, what you're wearing and what your doing and she tells you you're looking after the kids.'"
According to Redpath, "World Cups are challenging times, emotionally" and given that on Saturday the Gloucester head coach reintroduces a couple of pretty high-profile returnees – Mike Tindall and Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu – to league rugby, his views are worth listening to, especially as he went to three World Cups as a Scotland scrum-half himself.
"Physically you probably don't get challenged a huge amount because you might not play a lot of games," he says. "Since the end of May some of them might only have played 100 minutes of rugby. But it's that environment where you are always under scrutiny. It's very hard, as we have clearly seen, to keep on that level pegging. Some can do it impeccably, some others can't."
If there is no doubting to whom the coach is referring there, then the sympathies are slightly less obvious when he broadens the issue to how coaches suffer with players who either willingly carry injuries through World Cups or who are forced to play on while injured.
Tindall, because England reached the knockout stages in New Zealand, and Fuimaono-Sapolu, because of his drawn-out disciplinary wrangles with the International Rugby Board, are the last two of the seven Gloucester players to return to club duty. This week Richard Cockerill, the Leicester coach, spectacularly failed to mask his frustrations at losing his England scrum-half Ben Youngs, probably until the start of the Heineken Cup next month.
Cockerill's anger was understandable. It seems as though Youngs' current knee injury is the same one that he picked up at an England training camp in the summer. Leicester need all the help they can get. They are at the wrong end of a table they have dominated for a couple of decades and World Cups have dealt Tigers coaches some pretty difficult hands in the past. For one, Dean Richards, it cost him his job.
Less than three months after England returned victorious from Australia in 2003 Richards, then England's most successful club coach after winning back-to-back Heineken Cups and five league titles, was looking for work. Cockerill says he has been cut no slack by his board this time around.
"My remit will be to be successful in the Premiership and hopefully in Europe. Nothing changes," Cockerill says, having just finished tearing a strip off England for returning his first-choice scrum-half injured. "At the start of the season I told the board what kind of a squad we would have during the World Cup – if they all stay fit – and that we should be OK. But some of those guys didn't stay fit and we had to play with different combinations. But that's life and you have to work through it. Guys have to show their mettle."
Unfortunately for Cockerill, injuries compounded his problems and resulted in only one Leicester Premiership win from the six games played before Friday night's visit to Sale. While clubs such as Harlequins and Saracens, less burdened by World Cup demands, have flourished, Leicester are under the cosh in a manner which is rare for a team who so often have been top dog.
Leicester lost 12 players to the World Cup, which amounts to nearly a quarter of their squad. Harlequins and Saracens lost three and nine although Sale, who lie third in the table, lost a similar proportion of their squad to Leicester.
Rightly, Cockerill can see the finger being pointed at him.
"Criticism hurts because where we are in the league hurts, but you have to work through it," he says. "They say you should have recruited better, but five of those guys [with England] came through our academy. When you recruit a Test player you know what's coming and I don't do that with many, [although] when I recruited Thomas Waldrom I thought he was a Kiwi and then he turned out to be an Englishman. But that's one of those things." Presumably Cockerill will make a special note to check on ancestors as well as playing history in future.
"It's very difficult because if you want to compete in Europe you are going to have to have the kind of guys that play Test rugby. If you go middle of the road you might end up being OK in the Premiership, but being poor in Europe."
Mark McCall, the director of rugby at Saracens, has been keen to highlight the contribution of younger English players while others were at the World Cup.
"There's a lot of young English players at this club who have really emerged strongly in these first six games – Jamie George, Mako Vunipola, George Kruis, Jackson Wray, Will Fraser, Ben Spencer, Owen Farrell, James Short. We're very conscious of the people who've been at the World Cup. It's an unbelievably demanding tournament, physically and mentally. We've got 13 games on the bounce but because we rotate we'll be able to give people natural breaks as we go."
Cockerill believes Leicester were particularly hurt by the demands made on the club: "You have to understand that we had two tightheads [Martin Castrogiovanni with Italy and Dan Cole with England] away, a world-class nine [Youngs] and a world-class 10 [Toby Flood]."
Most were reintroduced last week in the Anglo-Welsh Cup win against Gloucester. Castrogiovanni is in tonight's squad.
"I had a choice, which has been rare this season," says Cockerill. But even then he says he had to be cautious about going for the quick fix at the expense of more long-term success. He has done the maths and reckons Leicester can afford only two more league defeats if they are to make the end-of-season play-offs.
"Each player is different," says Cockerill. "Some have needed their couple of weeks away and some want to come back and play straight away, but we have to look to the long haul. The here and now is important, but you don't want a kneejerk reaction where you play all your best players now and risk injury later on.
"You have to keep your bottle and believe in what you do."
