Lions coach Graham Henry believes that future Lions tours should not include midweek games.

Henry was speaking at the end of a gruelling tour of Australia that saw several key players fail to make the distance after an 11 month season.

"You are probably talking about Saturday games only, with a smaller squad," said Henry, in the aftermath of his team's 29-23 defeat at Stadium Australia.

"The game has changed from an amateur to a professional game, and players are under huge demand from a number of different sources, including clubs and Unions. The Lions coaches felt for the Tuesday group of players, because you just couldn't do the right kind of preparation.

"The only day you could get the players together was on the Monday. These gentlemen who were playing in that team are used to building for a game from a Sunday through to Saturday for their countries and their clubs.

"We thought that maybe and there needs to be some discussion on this - that there should be a reduced number of players, 28 or something like that, and just concentrate on having one game a week, building correctly for those games and going on from there," he added.

"Last week was an absolute nightmare. We didn't train with the 15 Test team players at any stage of the week we probably trained with 10 or 11 at maximum. I've been involved in rugby coaching for some years now, and I have never been in that situation before going into a big game.

"Scott Quinnell didn't train for the entire week before the Test match and Neil Back only had one training session, so to go into a Test match of that magnitude and for the game to be that close, was a miracle really.

"We could have pulled it out of the bag on Saturday, but if you knew what we went through as a group of players and a team, then you wouldn't have given us a dog's chance. They gave everything they had, but the tank is dry. A lot of guys were taped together just to get on the field and try to complete 80 minutes."

As for the future, Henry continued, "The players will probably need to take some responsibility for the amount of rugby they are going to play, where they say we can only play X number of games a year, and the contracts are tailored to do that.

"The players are going to have to look after their own welfare, because everyone wants their pound of flesh. If they don't look after their own welfare, then their shelf-life is going to be very short."