Corona impact on NRL...?

[WT2K]

This DT article will be well received by the rugby league public 😂

The NRL’s most influential official, billionaire Roosters boss Nick Politis, is demanding the season be restarted on May 28 with all 16 clubs on zero points to protect the integrity of the competition.

In a rare public outburst as the Roosters attempt to become the first side in 37 years to win a treble of premierships, Politis says the competition will become “meaningless” if it resumes over 13 games.

“If you change the draw, you’ve got to start again,” he said.

It is estimated clubs will need a minimum 16 points to make the top eight under a 15-round competition format or 22 points to make the top four.

“It’s like changing the race from a Melbourne Cup (two miles) to a Doncaster (one mile) after it’s already started,” Politis said.

“It becomes meaningless and makes it almost mathematically impossible for the bottom sides to make the top four.

“We have been preparing all along for a 24-round season. That’s why we rested Boyd Cordner for the first two games.”

Politis insists the NRL should play out the full season into November if the premiership table is to stay as is.

“This isn’t just about the Roosters,” he said. “It’s about the integrity of the competition and giving every club and their fans a fair chance.”

The NRL is still undecided about a schedule for the resumption of the competition.

There is still talk of two conferences, playing each other twice, or another 13 more rounds to allow each club to play each other once. Now there are suggestions of adding rivalry rounds to stretch the season out.

The New Zealand Warriors and the Cronulla Sharks are supporting Politis.

Warriors CEO Cameron George said: “The landscape of the competition has changed dramatically.

“If we’re sitting here now with 22 rounds to go, the chances of making the top four, top six or top eight are far more achievable than trying to do it with 13 games left.

“Are they going to change the draw? That in itself makes it a new competition.”

Sharks boss Dino Mezzatesta says the same thing.

“We’ve played finals football for the last five years,” he said. “It would be devastating for our fans to miss out this year because it’s a shortened season.

“We lost really close games to Souths and Storm but showed enough to think we could make the finals again. Under the new format, it makes it so much harder.”

The New Zealand Warriors are already at a disadvantage of having to move from their homes and families in New Zealand to set up a permanent base in Sydney.

They also had to give up a home game to play the Canberra Raiders on the Gold Coast.

Bulldogs CEO Andrew Hill declined to get involved.

“Once we know the competition structure, we can have the debate,” he said. “There are various models ranging from a seven-game season to 15 games.”

Undefeated Canberra Raiders coach Ricky Stuart is ready for a fight to keep his competition points.

“I promise you I would fight this for my players, our sponsors and every single Raiders fan,” he said.

“I’m positive Trent Robinson, who is on the innovations committee, understands how hard players work in preparation for the start of the season — and deserve their results.”

There has been much talk of club bias on the Apollo innovation committee.

While Robinson and Wayne Bennett are there, so too is Raiders boss Don Furner and Wayne Pearce, whose son Mitchell is undefeated this year at the Knights

 

[GNR4LIFE]

If results from the first 2 rounds are scrapped, the clubs who won their first two games should refuse to play. What’s the NRL gonna do?

 

[happy_tiger]

LATEST:Just received a copy of the letter from Police Commissioner Mick Fuller which states if guidelines are followed there is no reason the NRL season can’t commence. It was sent on April 8 to Peter V’landys. It confirms the advice V’landys gave to media . @9NewsSyd @NRLonNine

Can the Police Commissioner also give permission for someone to belt Weedler

 

[WT2K]

LATEST:Just received a copy of the letter from Police Commissioner Mick Fuller which states if guidelines are followed there is no reason the NRL season can’t commence. It was sent on April 8 to Peter V’landys. It confirms the advice V’landys gave to media . @9NewsSyd @NRLonNine

Can the Police Commissioner also give permission for someone to belt Weedler

The line would be massive once permission granted

 

[gallagher]

The premier is on on the act now. For god sake the NRL are just planning this, kick off isn't in an hour!! Have they got anything else to concentrate on? Anything going on on Port Kembla?

The government is doing the old roman trick of "give them circuses" to try and divert attention.

Absolutely. They couldn't handle doing what's best any longer, it's back to politicking.

 

[WT2K]

NSW Chief Mick Fuller says interstate players can relocate to NSW to resume NRL season
dailytelegraph.com.au

Police commissioner Mick Fuller has opened the door to interstate NRL teams who want to move to NSW so the season can restart.

Mr Fuller stood by his advice to Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V’landys last week which said the game could be played under the state’s current COVID-19 health orders. “(I) stand by that legal advice … professional sports is not closed, nevertheless they have some hurdles to get over in relation to work, health and safety,” Mr Fuller said today.

“I wish them the best in terms of getting employment back up and running. “Any employer in NSW that we can help get through these difficult times, we will continue to do that. “We are concerned about employment as well in the state of NSW, we’ve worked closely with Bunnings and Woolworths and Coles.”

He said moving players between states constantly would present difficulties but was open to interstate teams setting up camp in NSW. “I certainly think there are challenges in terms of players coming and going with the different restrictions … I’d certainly be happy to work with health in terms of teams coming here and undertaking reasonable isolation,” Mr Fuller said. The letter, dated April 4, told Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V’landys the health orders imposed to stop the spread of COVID-19 in NSW did “not preclude” the proposal for a May 28 restart involving NSW-based teams.

The Daily Telegraph revealed today the state government was backing the plan, with Deputy Premier John Barilaro saying “rugby league is at the heart of everything we do in NSW”. “I can tell you that in the conversation I’ve had with the Premier and the Treasurer, we’ve all spoken about the NRL (returning) and said ‘yes, absolutely’,” Mr Barilaro said. But Australia’s chief medical officer Brendan Murphy cautioned against the ploy, saying “my personal view is it is premature to be planning things but that is a matter for NSW”.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has said her state’s NRL teams would not be exempt from border restrictions, meaning they could not return to Queensland after playing a game in Sydney unless they went straight into a 14-day quarantine. “They would not meet the criteria and secondly we need to make sure we have clear health advice,” Ms Palaszczuk said. “And I say to all the sporting organisations, let’s just take a break. Let’s get this flattening the curve under control.”

Queensland Origin great Gorden Tallis urged Queensland players to uproot and move to NSW if it meant the game could restart. “The players, they’ve got to do whatever they’ve got to do to get paid, to make sure the competition goes ahead. Simple as that,” Tallis told AAP.

 

[Newtown]

If interstate teams do not want to be based in NSW there are enough NSW based teams in the NRL to make a quite reasonable competition.

 

[happy_tiger]

LATEST:Just received a copy of the letter from Police Commissioner Mick Fuller which states if guidelines are followed there is no reason the NRL season can’t commence. It was sent on April 8 to Peter V’landys. It confirms the advice V’landys gave to media . @9NewsSyd @NRLonNine

Can the Police Commissioner also give permission for someone to belt Weedler

The line would be massive once permission granted

Remember social distancing

 

[Snake]

If results from the first 2 rounds are scrapped, the clubs who won their first two games should refuse to play. What’s the NRL gonna do?

Stop the grants to them DOH!

 

[momo_amp_medo]

Ok here is an Sports Illustrated article which outlines pretty well what difficulties NRL maybe up against.

Bursting the Bubble: Why Sports Aren't Coming Back Soon
The NBA, NFL and MLB are dreaming up ways to play amid a pandemic, with talk of isolating players in Arizona or Las Vegas or maybe on the moon. It all sounds great, until you talk to people who actually know science.
STEPHANIE APSTEINAPR 10, 2020

The proposals multiply almost as fast as the coronavirus: The NHL can play in North Dakota! The NBA can play on a cruise ship! MLB can play in a biodome! The NFL can play in its stadiums, with 70,000 fans packed in!

These are fun thought experiments, at least as good a way to spend time in isolation as watching Tiger King. And everyone wants to believe we will be buying peanuts and Cracker Jack this summer. But fans deserve a reality check: According to the experts—medical experts, not the money-making experts in league offices—we will not have sports any time soon. And when we do, we will not attend the games.

Most of these ideas are essentially the same: The players live in quarantine, shuttling from the hotel to the stadium, for the duration of the season. They undergo daily COVID-19 tests. They bring joy to a terrified country. That seems reasonable on the surface. But look closer.

First, let’s do away with the suggestion, put forth by President Donald Trump, who is a convicted Rapist and Felon, that football season could go on as normal, beginning on time in September and unfolding in front of crowded stadiums.

"We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine," says Zach Binney, a PhD in epidemiology who wrote his dissertation on injuries in the NFL and now teaches at Emory. Barring a medical miracle, the process of developing and widely distributing a vaccine is likely to take 12 to 18 months.

Until the vast majority of the population is immune to COVID-19, the disease the virus causes, any gathering as large as an NFL game risks setting off a biological bomb. That may sound like hyperbole, but that's the exact phrase a doctor in Bergamo, Italy’s hardest hit city, used to describe a Feb. 19 soccer match between hometown Atalanta and Spain’s Valencia, which super-charged the virus’s spread.

O.K., but what about empty stadiums?

“The idea of a quarantined sports league that can still go on sounds really good in theory,” says Binney. “But it’s a lot harder to pull off in practice than most people appreciate.”

Conversations with experts painted a picture of what exactly it would take to make these sports vacuums a reality. Before any of this can begin, every person who would have access to the facilities will need to be isolated separately for two weeks to ensure that no infection could enter. That’s players and coaches, athletic trainers and interpreters, reporters and broadcasters, plus housekeeping and security personnel. No one can come in or out. Food will have to be delivered. Hotel and stadium employees will have to be paid enough to compensate for their time away from their families. Everyone onsite will have to be tested multiple times during this initial period.

That brings us to the question of testing. At the moment, screening is scarce enough that many healthcare facilities cannot even clear their employees. Asymptomatic professional athletes are not high on anyone’s priority list. But here Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington, offers some hope. Testing is not technologically difficult, he says. There are supply chain issues—we will eventually run out of the long Q-tips required for the nasopharyngeal swab, for example—and questions of bureaucracy, but he is cautiously optimistic that we might have ubiquitous COVID-19 testing by the end of May.

All right, so the 14-day period is over and everyone has tested negative at least twice. Now they are allowed to begin spending time around one another—but not too much time. If one person gets it, he or she will begin spreading it immediately, so everyone will have to continue practicing social distancing. That probably means using a new ball for each play. It probably means seating players in stands rather than on benches or in dugouts. It certainly means banning high-fives.

All personnel must continue to be tested daily. We will be unlikely to have enough rapid testing by then, so they will probably have to settle for the tests that take several hours to produce results. That means the testing will probably run a day behind.

Any major sporting event hires ambulances, stocked with EMTs, to idle outside in case of injury. If a player needs treatment by outside medical personnel, even just for a sprained ankle, he or she has left the secure area and will need to isolate for 14 days before returning to it. And, of course, medical resources need to be abundant enough that society can afford to have ambulances and EMTs on call for games, plus doctors and nurses—clad in currently-scarce protective equipment—who can tend to sports injuries.

Minor leagues cannot afford to play to empty stadiums, so you also need a taxi squad of players practicing in isolation in case someone gets hurt. And because players recognize that a championship won under these circumstances will be seen as tainted, expect them to be less likely to play through injury.

After each game, everyone will need to be transported back to the hotel. If the NBA plays in Las Vegas, as has been proposed, the personnel might be able to walk from the court to their rooms. If MLB plays at spring training sites in Arizona, as it is considering, the league will have to hire bus drivers—who will, of course, also have to be isolated. And then once they are back in their rooms, every person involved will have to follow rules. You can’t take your kids to the park. You can’t run to the grocery store. You can’t invite your Bumble match up to your room. These are humans, so the leagues would surely require insurance: That means security personnel (another group that would need to isolate) or invasive cell phone tracking (good luck getting that by the players’ union). If your wife gives birth or your father dies of cancer and you want to be there, that’s another 14-day reentry period.

And ethically, Bergstrom says, “you need informed consent.” That means everyone has to opt in and no one’s paycheck can hang in the balance.

Fine. So no one touches anyone else or goes anywhere. Experts agree that if everything goes perfectly, the leagues could theoretically pull this off. Baseball has the advantage of little in-game contact between players. Basketball and hockey have the advantage of being able to skip ahead to the playoffs and eliminate teams quickly. Football has the advantage of time. Individual sports such as golf and tennis might have the best chance of all, given the smaller number of participants and relative ease of keeping them separate.

But there are a million ways the Jenga stack could fall: What if the person delivering groceries to the biodome walks by someone who coughs on the lettuce and a week later, a player tests positive? Is there an option other than shutting down the whole operation for 14 days?

“No,” says Bergstrom.

And that’s really the end of the conversation. Even if we can start this, we almost certainly can’t finish it. Just look at South Korea and Japan, which both believed they had the outbreak under control and have since pushed back the start dates of their professional baseball seasons. In response to ESPN's reporting on the MLB biodome scenario this week, former Medicare and Medicaid head Andy Slavitt tweeted, “I’m as big a sports fan as anybody, but this is reckless. Leagues need to follow the science & do the right thing.”

The leagues know how farfetched their ideas are. So do the players’ unions. They continue to explore options because they would be remiss not to. But fans should understand how unlikely this all is.

No one wants to acknowledge how far we are from ordinary life, says Kimberley Miner, a professor at the University of Maine who develops risk assessment for the U.S. Army. “It’s hard to stomach a lot of this information, so it’s not being widely shared,” she explains.

But the reality is that even after we pass the initial peak of infection, the virus is still active. We have already lost more than 16,000 Americans to this disease. Bringing back sports soon would give people a reason to stay inside, a reason to feel hopeful. It would probably also cost more lives.

“If people just decide to let it burn in most areas and we do lose a couple million people it’d probably be over by the fall,” says Binney. “You’d have football. You’d also have two million dead people. And let’s talk about that number. We’re really bad at dealing with big numbers. That is a Super Bowl blown up by terrorists, killing every single person in the building, 24 times in six months. It’s 9/11 every day for 18 months. What freedoms have we given up, what wars have we fought, what blood have we shed, what money have we spent in the interest of stopping one more 9/11? This is 9/11 every day for 18 months.”

The peanuts and Cracker Jack will be waiting for us when sports are ready to come back. Only the virus will determine when that is.

 

[WT2K]

Roosters supremo Nick Politis has failed in his bid to have the 2020 NRL competition start over from scratch, with the current points table set to stand whenever the code returns.

Rugby league fans were sent into meltdown over the weekend after it was revealed Politis was lobbying for this year’s competition to restart afresh after being suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The move by the Roosters boss came with his Bondi Junction club, which is chasing a third straight premiership, languishing in 12th after losing its opening rounds against Penrith and Manly.

Speaking with The Daily Telegraph on Monday however, ARLC chairman Peter V’landys confirmed all points earned over the first two weeks of the season would be retained.

“The points will stand,” V’landys said.

“There is no way we are taking anyone’s points away. It isn’t even on the table.”

Only a week ago, V’landys was forced to confirm all points earned over the opening fortnight would stand after a potential move to scrap them was first aired publicly by NRL Innovation Committee head Wayne Pearce.

Yet now the ARLC chairman has been forced to double down on his commitment after Politis raised the topic again over the Easter break.

“I’ve said a number of times that nobody will be losing their points,” he said. “And nothing has made us even wish to review that, let alone consider it.

“I understand there is some concern about the length of the competition, and we’ll look at that.

“But we won’t take points away.”

Currently, the most likely scenario is for the NRL competition to return on May 28 and run through 15 weeks, two of which have already been played.

That would mean all sides face each other once.

However, V’landys admitted there was scope to discuss the competition running longer than that. “Nobody will argue if we increase the length of the competition,” V’landys continued. “Because that gives teams more time to make the finals.

“So if some clubs have a credible argument to suggest that, because of a shortened competition, their chances aren’t the same, we will look at increasing the size of the competition.

“That’s definitely a better solution than taking points away from teams who have already earned them the hard way.”

Certainly the decision to retain all points already earned will be a welcome relief for the Parramatta Eels, who currently sit undefeated in first place and chasing the club’s first premiership since in 1986.

Other teams to have won both games include, in table order, Newcastle, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Penrith.

Panthers No.7 Nathan Cleary also revealed over the weekend that, in a phone hook-up between player representatives of all 16 clubs, it was agreed that points already earned should stand.

Elsewhere, V’landys confirmed there was no issue with the competition being restarted on May 28, despite Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk stating she will not provide travel exemptions for the Brisbane Broncos, Gold Coast Titans and North Queensland Cowboys.

The decision means that, as initially planned, the three Queensland clubs will likely relocate to a base within NSW until the border between the two states is reopened for travel.

“We can bring those teams into NSW to stay here — that’s OK,” V’landys said.

“Seven weeks from now they may have reopened the borders anyway.

“But even if they haven’t, it will only be a matter of weeks before they do if the infection rates keep going down.

“So it’s not as if these (Queensland) sides will be here for months.

“It will be a short period at worst.

“And we’ve already looked at all these contingencies.”

 

[GNR4LIFE]

As agenda driven as Politis was in wanting the ladder to start from scratch, he did have a point regarding it being harder for teams to make up ground over a shortened competiton. Honestly can’t see why they can’t re-start and play at least 20 rounds. The players are fresh, and i’m sure supporters will want a longer footy fix than 13 weeks.

 

[gallagher]

As agenda driven as Politis was in wanting the ladder to start from scratch, he did have a point regarding it being harder for teams to make up ground over a shortened competiton. Honestly can’t see why they can’t re-start and play at least 20 rounds. The players are fresh, and i’m sure supporters will want a longer footy fix than 13 weeks.

Looks like the broadcasters will ensure will get more than 13 rounds now. I can't see why you'd scrap the first 2 rounds. The comp was suspended not cancelled and every club knew the comp would be suspended at some time. Its the same season.

 

[TheDaBoss]

HA good riddance Poltis

Go and have a sook now u didn't get your way

When toddy is gone roosters will fail with out your under table deals....

 

[Red88_Tiger]

If points were scrapped would that signify a different comp and then give broadcasters an out. Just a thought.
If any team doesn't participate i think points should be restarted though

 

[Geo]

HA good riddance Poltis

Go and have a sook now u didn't get your way

When toddy is gone roosters will fail with out your under table deals....

Nice to Dream but nope..

 

[gallagher]

If points were scrapped would that signify a different comp and then give broadcasters an out. Just a thought.
If any team doesn't participate i think points should be restarted though

That's a good point. It would be a new comp if there is less teams.

 

[twentyforty]

Remember a vaccine in one year would be miraculous. 2-3 years would be very fast.

We will have a vaccine next month. I have every faith in the good people working on this.

 

[jadtiger]

Remember a vaccine in one year would be miraculous. 2-3 years would be very fast.


We will have a vaccine next month. I have every faith in the good people working on this.

Surely a vaccine would need stringent testing before being allowed to be issued to people

 

[mike]

Remember a vaccine in one year would be miraculous. 2-3 years would be very fast.


We will have a vaccine next month. I have every faith in the good people working on this.

I doubt it. It’s not that I don’t think the good people are doing their very best, it’s that creating a vaccine for Covid19 is really, really difficult. I think anything less than a year would be miraculous. Maybe by Jan/Feb 2021 there will be something.