Chiefs coach Colin Cooper has called for an overhaul of the All Blacks resting policy for the Super Rugby season.
As it currently stands, New Zealand Rugby has dictated that All Blacks are limited to a total of 180 minutes through the opening three rounds of the tournament, as they look to restrict workloads during a World Cup year.
Cooper believes that approach is flawed, making implementing tactics and embedding combinations difficult, especially when taking injuries into account.
"I think they should just cut them out of the first three games and keep it plain and simple," Cooper said at Chiefs training on Tuesday.
"Minutes are tough because of injuries. You can have a good plan but injuries always muck that up."
That was the case during the side's heavy 54-17 loss to the Brumbies in Canberra on Saturday, where Cooper was forced to keep lock Brodie Retallick on the park for the entire game due to an injury to Michael Allardyce.
Retallick now has just 33 minutes of his allotment remaining against the Sunwolves in Hamilton on Saturday.
"We had a plan to take him off…we didn’t want him to play the whole 80 [minutes]. It would've been better to play more minutes in this game in front of his home crowd."
The minute restriction also means the winless Chiefs will be without Nathan Harris, Anton Lienert-Brown and Nepo Laulala for the clash against the Japanese franchise this weekend.
After such a comprehensive defeat in Canberra, Cooper has plenty of areas of improvement identified for this week's training.
"Attack-wise, our ball was slowed down and we got really messy. They did a good job on us there, so we need to carry better.
"Defensively, we didn't connect as well as we should've so we've been working hard on that. They scored three tries because we weren't connected. We're not quite together on the system yet.
"We'll continue to work on that and we've got a lot of confidence that it'll come right."
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