THE Celtic League and injuries - a double negative which already threatens the Welsh rugby season after only one weekend.

A ridiculously early start to the season was highlighted by the number of players missing from the leading Welsh team, while most of them showed little appetite for the new Celtic League.

The four Irish provinces marked the debut of the new competition with four wins in four starts.

Ulster crushed Swansea at Ravenhill, Leinster hammered Glasgow and Munster won in Edinburgh, while the biggest shock came when Connacht, the weakest of the Irish teams, rocked Cardiff at the Arms Park.

No-one is underestimating the strength of the Irish sides, but already they appear to be taking the Celtic League more seriously than their rivals and they appear to hade a cleaner bill of health.

Partly because of the foot-and-mouth crisis they have played far fewer games this year than Welsh teams and are therefore fresher and keener.

Welsh teams are hard hit by injuries before the season even gets under way. A whole series of players are missing because of injury a carried over from last season or the British Lions tour to Australia mainly because of the greater number of games teams here play compared with in Ireland.

Out because of injury, in some cases for a long time are Mark Taylor, Neil Jenkins, Rob Howley, Darren Morris, Robin McBryde, Scott Quinnell and Ian Gough.

Gough is still out with a damaged shoulder suffered in last season's cup final while Taylor's knee injury which put him out last season has flared up again.

It all seems to prove the point that players in Wales play far too much rugby.

England have sorted themselves out and an eight-year deal has been signed, part of which limits leading players to 30 games a season.

Irish and Scottish players don't make that many appearances anyway which means Welsh players are lagging behind.

Already Wales coach Graham Henry through his national newspaper column and team manager Alun Phillips on television have highlighted the problems and have pleaded for something to be done.

But there is little or no chance of that happening because the game in Wales is still financed to a great degree by private backers.

As such they want a proper investment for their money and rightly so.

Benefactors are not going to pay out millions of pounds of their own money only to find club appearances are going to be limited on their investment.

The answer is far greater funding needs to come from the WRU, making the need for individual backers considerably less.

The top English clubs are to receive £2m a season from the RFU compared with £800,000 for their Welsh counterparts.

As I've written before, the danger is that top Welsh players will be cherry picked again, but as for getting agreement on reducing the number of appearances by leading players there is next to no chance.

The result of all this could be that the Celtic League will receive a low priority from Welsh clubs. What chance Joost van der Westhuizen making his Newport debut in Munster on September 8 for example?

Precious little. Much more likely is the home game against Connacht and the following two nitty gritty away games against Neath and Bridgend.