I would suspect it's fair to assume that most people reading this Briefing would say they are advocates of natural turf.

When faced with a choice of a well maintained real grass surface or an artificial one, I don't think it would be too much of a leap of faith to also assume that would be the preferred choice of the majority of players, fans and managers too - across a whole range of sports.

But the reality is of course, artificial surfaces play an important role in today's sporting facilities. They allow venues to play host to multi-use surfaces, they open themselves up to constant community use, and for smaller clubs for whom postponements of fixtures due to weather can have crippling financial consequences, they provide a continued revenue stream.

The proliferation of artificial surfaces in the future therefore, would only seem to be on an upward trajectory.

With this being the case, it's more important than ever that thorough, ongoing research is carried out to monitor the safety of these surfaces for users.

It was interesting therefore, to recently read that the Rugby Football Union (RFU), Premiership Rugby (PRL) and the Rugby Players’ Association (RPA) have developed a new action plan to mitigate injury risk in the English professional game, following a study of the data in the 2016/17 Professional Rugby Injury Surveillance Project (PRISP) report.

This report covered areas such as looking at the laws of the game or looking at concussion risk in the tackle to make sure everything that could be was being done to lower the risk of players getting hurt.

One interesting area of the report for our sector, specifically considered 'Artificial grass pitch risk in the elite game'.

The report explained that the RFU, PRL and RPA first commissioned a study to investigate the impact of artificial playing surfaces during the 2012/13 season, when the first artificial surface for match play was installed in the English Premiership. Today, three English Premiership teams play their home fixtures on artificial playing surfaces - Saracens at Allianz Park, Newcastle Falcons at Kingston Park and Worcester Warriors at Kingston Park.

The 2014-15 report provided a summary of the key findings from that study, showing no clear differences in the incidence severity or overall injury burden of time loss injuries between artificial or natural turf surfaces.

However, the figures for the 2016-17 season show a significantly higher incidence and burden of injury when playing on artificial turf. As the report points out, "This is the first season where the incidence and burden of injury on artificial turf is higher than on natural grass."

It is important to stress though that the report does state, "the mean incidence, severity and burden of injury for the four years investigated shows no clear differences between the two surface types and therefore more data must be collected to establish if this 2016-17 increase is more meaningful than season to season variation."

This seems to be the key - ongoing research. If it's inevitable that artificial surfaces are to become more common, it's only fair on the players using them, that they know everything has been done to make them as safe as possible.

Analysis and investigation across all sporting disciplines that are relying on artificial surfaces ever more heavily, must be up to date, thorough and extensive.