This year’s Autumn international fixtures feature a familiar set of match-ups, Wales play Australia yet again and England and Ireland have mouth-watering meetings with the All Blacks. However these five-star fixtures aren’t what’s getting us at Shop Rugby most excited for November, it’s the return of a very special kind of match which has made a sudden and slightly unexpected comeback.

Club v Country fixtures are seemingly back on the international calendar and it marks the start of the change of the global rugby season that many believed wasn’t meant to begin until after the next World Cup. The idea of giving more tests to so-called “tier 2 and 3” rugby nations is something that most rugby fans can agree on, the disagreement comes in how best to do this. We’ve all seen the arguments about what to do about the 6 Nations considering the rise of Georgia and the potential in teams like Romania, Germany and Spain. And on the other side of the world, you have people calling for Japan and the Pacific Islands to join the Rugby Championship. All things like this take time, so it’s promising that World Rugby and the Unions have found a good solution for the meantime.

There are some fascinating match-ups coming up in November, with Coventry and Oxford Uni hosting Canada, Dragons playing Hong Kong and Russia, Cardiff Blues and Ulster will face Uruguay at the Cardiff Arms Park and Kingspan Stadium respectively and Welsh invitational side Crawshays RFC will also be playing Hong Kong at the Gnoll in Neath. Hong Kong and Canada will be getting ready for their World Cup repechage tournament (a fascinating set of fixtures in itself, in their current form we could see Canada miss out on a spot at RWC 2019 and see Kenya, Germany or Hong Kong in their place) while Uruguay and Russia will have these fixtures as a part of their normal November tests.

While these games won’t draw the crowds of the 70s and 80s when the likes of Llanelli and Neath were playing the likes of New Zealand and Australia, they’re already a big hit with the die-hard fans and they provide the kind of opportunity for those not around in those days to experience this kind of classic fixture.

So what lies in the future for international rugby? Post-2019 seems like a scary unknown world at the moment, with too many uncertainties to feel comfortable about the international calendar we’re all used to. There are talks of a nations league replacing both summer and autumn internationals to bring more meaning to tests, as well as the expansions/changes to the 6 Nations and Rugby Championship as we mentioned before. There are even rumours that Lions tours may change as we know them, if not disappear entirely.

Change can be difficult in a sport that loves traditions as much as rugby does, but change is necessary for improvement and inclusion. We all love the 6 Nations as they are but we can’t expect rugby to become truly global when the world’s premier international annual competitions are limited to 6 teams in the Northern Hemisphere and 4 in the South. On the cusp of becoming top nations are Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Japan, USA, Namibia, Canada, Romania, Russia and Georgia. There has also been an explosion in countries making a big attempt to become competitive, like Germany, Spain, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, and China. That is a lot of countries to exclude in the name of tradition.

While tradition is helping rugby expand with the return of club v country games, maybe it’s time to let some other traditions go for the same reasons. Rugby will survive if the 6 Nations is replaced by something else. It won’t if we keep developing countries from sharing with us at the top table.