A damning indictment of the over-playing of leading rugby players this year has been delivered by one of the world’s leading sports scientists.

Professor Tim Noakes, director of the Sports Science Institute in Cape Town, carried out a thorough assessment of the top South Africans and how much rugby they were playing.

His report, revealed in the light of South Africa’s disastrous end of season northern hemisphere tour in which they lost four of their five matches including the Test against Ireland in Dublin, concluded that players like Springbok captain John Smit were “in complete denial” about the way they have been over extending themselves, physically and mentally.

Smit, who has just released a book, is now spending 10 days up to Christmas on a whistle-stop tour of his country promoting it. Noakes said: “It seems clear that John Smit is in complete denial about the state of his own body and its needs. He is like a lot of the top Springboks – he needs an eight-week rest in which he should not see a rugby ball or do anything.”

Smit, he says, urgently needs to put his feet up, stay at home with his family and take complete rest and relaxation after an 11-month season. A country-wide book tour? “If he does this tour he has lost the plot completely,” said Noakes.

“This is not having a break from travelling, living in hotels and the emotional hype which is all part of it. I don’t think players understand that side of it. Anything like this which leaves you open to public exposure means your system gets hyped up and you can’t sustain that for a long time.

“Touring South Africa to sell a book represents, to my way of thinking, completely losing the plot. Because he has got to continue to hype himself, give talks, be cordial to people and do multiple media interviews when he should be completely away from all that. It keeps him up on this high and I’ll tell you the price he will pay. He’ll have a bad 2010 rugby-wise because eventually his system will collapse, mentally and physically.

“He should be away from the public eye doing nothing. He needs an absolute emotional break from everything. He must not think about rugby for at least two months.”

Noakes revealed that Smit accumulated a total of 2,081 minutes of match play in 2009. Yet hooker Bismarck du Plessis racked up 2,422 minutes, probably an all-time Springbok record.

He went on: “In the past seven seasons, Bakkies Botha has not been able to stay injury-free the following season if he played more than 1,350 minutes in the previous season. Prior to the European tour he had already accumulated 1,454 minutes. Thus his back injury on the tour was a predictable “accident” waiting to happen. These totals do not include the additional minutes they accumulated in the three most recent European tests.”

Before the South Africans' European tour even began, Noakes presented evidence to explain why he insisted 13 of the Springboks should not have toured Europe this year.

The evidence related not so much to the certainty that the majority of those Springboks would play poorly on the tour — that was sufficiently predictable that it required no intelligent debate, he said — but rather to the long-term consequences of what he called “this ill-considered decision”.

Noakes went on to say that the immediate consequence of this over-exposure will be that the Springboks will not be as dominant in the 2010 Tri-Nations as they were this year. Furthermore, he added, the task of winning the 2011 Rugby World Cup has now been made more difficult.

Of the Springbok management, he said: “The inexplicable paradox is that those who manage South African rugby have proven that they are deeply committed to making this country the world’s leading rugby nation. But they seem unable to comprehend the magnitude of the damage that the end-of-year tours inflict on that ambition.”

We should not kid ourselves that South Africa is the only country guilty of this syndrome. Noakes’ words represent a warning to countries like Ireland not to overplay their best players.

In truth, the IRFU is one of the better, more visionary unions in terms of the way they try to control the amount of rugby their top men play.

In other countries, like France for example, the stars are playing far too often and their performances are suffering accordingly. It goes to show that how the players are handled and how much time they are given off will be critical factors in the build-up to the 2011 World Cup.