How safe is a hard pitch? How can we manage and monitor the safety aspects?

For contact sports such Rugby Union and Rugby League playing on dry pitches which are likely to be hard, needs careful monitoring due to the higher risk of injury. Clubs and officials need to take a similar approach to how they review winter pitch conditions when they are frozen or water logged pitches, i.e. is the pitch dangerous to play on and/or will playing on the pitch do serious long term damage to the playing surface? A common sense approach needs to prevail and where necessary matches should be postponed and cancelled in advance to avoid unnecessary travel etc.

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