Super League 2020 - After Coronavirus

Most sports articles I’ve read in the last few days have emphasised how little sport matters in the midst of a global pandemic. I’m not even going to bother telling you that. It’s so jarringly obvious that it doesn’t need saying. Besides, anyone who has been subjected to the relentless doom-mongering of the terminally clueless on social media needs a distraction. I’m sticking to the rugby in my columns over the coming weeks and months. With that in mind I’m starting with a look at what might happen when we reach that joyous day when the authorities give the sporting organisations of the world the green light to get back to doing what they do.

Unlike some other sports rugby league has been halted at a relatively early stage of the season. Only seven weeks of competition have taken place and with further postponements for storms Ciara and Dennis and the World Club Challenge most teams have played fewer than seven games. That’s less than a quarter of the planned schedule. So there will be no talk of handing out trophies or even playoff places to those who have got out of the blocks quickly. That will be good news for Saints and new coach Kristian Woolf. If the current table were used to decide playoff positions Saints would miss out on the end of season jamboree for the first time since the playoffs were reintroduced in 1998.

It seems likely that the season will be shortened. It has been suspended initially until April 3 but all the evidence available right now suggests that date is wildly optimistic. China is only now starting to get back to something like normality after having their first case of coronavirus in mid-November. If the effects in the UK mirror those seen in China it will be somewhere around the end of May before we can think about allowing thousands of fans to gather for a Super League game, the first known case having been identified on January 31. That timetable is far from certain given that Boris Johnson has been rather slower in implementing the draconian measures utilised by the Chinese government.

There is the possibility to play games behind closed doors at an earlier stage but this is not an option favoured by the club owners. They are fearful for their clubs’ futures if they miss out on the gate receipts. Playing behind closed doors would likely need some kind of additional cash injection from Sky in order to cover the loss of those gate receipts in return for live rights to all of the games. That seemed feasible when rugby league was the only show in town this past weekend as the broadcaster scratched around for live content, but the closer we get to a resumption of the football season the less desperate Sky will be to fund our show in the meantime. That ship has probably sailed.

So if we are taking the end of May as a best case scenario that means eight or nine of the scheduled 29 rounds will be lost. That figure of 29 is what it is because of the presence of loop fixtures. Ordinarily each team would play all others home and away before playing a further three home and three away games - known as loop fixtures - based on last season’s league positions. Add in the Magic Weekend and you have your 29 games.

This year’s Magic Weekend falls within the period that we expect to be shut down in our scenario and can probably be written off. That would be a significant financial hit for the game but is perfectly expendable in the context of the integrity of the competition. Losing the loop fixtures is another option with purely financial implications but the problem there is that Toronto have already played their loop fixtures. The Canadian side cannot play at home in the early months of the season due to the harsh winter climate. Before coronavirus was a consideration it made sense to front-load their schedule with their loop fixtures. So simply eliminating the third meeting between any two sides in a fixture reshuffle could mean that some fans won’t get a trip to Toronto. For some fans that is the only thing persuading them that having a North American team in Super League is a good thing. They’ll tell you they’re genuine expansionists, but they’ll also tell you that they shouldn’t be asked to go to Hull on a Thursday.

If we were to scrap loop fixtures we might just squeeze all of the fixtures in in time for the scheduled start of the playoffs on September 17. Even that would probably require a midweek game or two to be slotted in. If the crisis were to go on any longer than we have seen in China there may be some appetite for scrapping the playoffs altogether. This would reduce the time needed to complete the season by three weeks assuming we held on to the concept of a Grand Final at Old Trafford on October 10. In this scenario the Grand Final could simply be a meeting of the top two sides in the table once the regular rounds are completed.

Don’t like that? How about we cull the Grand Final too? Many rugby league fans have long argued that the team finishing at the top of the table at the end of the regular season should be crowned champions. They are the most consistent side and the League Leaders Shield hasn’t been viewed as a credible reward for that consistency since someone had the brilliant idea of calling it the League Leaders Shield. It’s such an underwhelming name, an explicit reminder that you haven’t actually won anything at all and that the real battles are still ahead. Which of course is nonsense but is nevertheless the world we live in.

Of course no playoffs and no Grand Final would have a financial impact. The broadcasters would not be pleased and there would also be the small matter of the loss of revenue that would come from not bothering to sell 65,000 to 70,000 tickets for the Old Trafford showpiece. That is unlikely to be a pill that the club owners would swallow easily. More so than many sports rugby league is always concerned with finances. It exists hand to mouth and has shown in taking the Sky money and creating the Grand Final that it would struggle to exist professionally if left to its own devices.

If we want to keep the playoffs and Grand Final and fit in all of the remaining games on the schedule we will need to extend the season. Unlike football which has a raft of players whose contracts expire at the end of June, most rugby league players in the final year of their deals are contracted to their clubs until the end of November. That gives clubs a further six weeks from the current Grand Final date without having to worry about negotiating extensions to existing deals. That could be crucial because again unlike the billionaire football industry rugby league doesn’t have the finances to pay players for longer than has already been agreed.

Any extension could have a knock-on effect (see what I did there?) on the start of next season but there is precedent for this. When the sport switched to summer for the first Super League season in 1996 it meant a truncated final winter season in 1995/96. With a tweak or two to the programme it may be possible to start the 2021 season somewhat later than the last week in January. There is a good argument for a later start in any event given the frequency of weather-related postponements at the start of the campaign as the seasons shift and the harshest conditions drift into March. If that means taking one or two games out of the 29-game schedule for 2021 that may be something the game has to live with and adapt to. Having been through the experience of what looks set to be a challenging and fairly chaotic 2020 season by then the game’s decision makers may not consider a slight reduction in the schedule for 2021 to be quite the big deal it has always seemed.

If Woolf had a vote on these options it may go to the next alternative on the list, which is to forget about what has happened so far in 2021 and plot an entirely new competition schedule from whenever play is able to restart. In that scenario Woolf’s shaky start would be expunged from the record like it never happened. Woolf could wake up from those nightmares at Warrington and Castleford and at home to Huddersfield to find that Bobby Ewing is in his shower and it has all been a bad dream.

Others who have started the season better such as Castleford, Leeds and Wigan might not be so keen to erase that little bit of history. A total reset might be advantageous to us Saints fans but it wouldn’t sit well with this one. It would feel a little bit like those six league games are 480 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. Like watching Catalans Dragons under Steve McNamara. I don’t feel great about them as it is, but at least if the results stand they will feel like part of some purposeful journey, even if it takes another five years to win a Grand Final again. Often it is only after you have been served up a large portion of dung that you can really appreciate the sweeter stuff. There’s something to be said for that even if it is totally invisible to a significant number of Facebook fans.

If the major movers in the game cannot agree on a way forward from any of these suggestions then maybe they will be left with one, solitary nuclear option. Just forget about it. Scrap the season. No champion, no relegation, no promotion from the Championship. But again there are financial issues to consider. Do the clubs really want to pay their players a full year’s salary if they are going to be inactive till pre-season starts up at the end of the year? And what about season ticket holders who have paid in advance for their 14 home games at their club? I’m quite happy to sacrifice my £300 if the games are played behind closed doors and I can continue my journey with the team from in front of the TV. I paid that money knowing that a certain amount of fixtures were going to happen without me due to my impending surgery in any case. I say impending, it gets further and further away with each day that coronavirus hangs around but that’s another, altogether scarier story. I’d be less happy about that outlay if we are just going to write the whole thing off. Some fans may be willing to let that money go for the good of their club’s financial future but if even a small percentage are not you have a problem. Either clubs face the financial burden of giving some or all of the money back from season ticket sales for a null and void season or there will be some grumpy fans out there who might think twice about buying a season ticket for next year lest the next biblical plague come down from the gods and interrupt proceedings. Either way there is the chance that clubs will feel it where it hurts them most. In the pocket.

Somehow, at some point, if rugby league as we know it is to survive and thrive the show must go on. It doesn’t matter when. None of it matters really in the current climate but it is far more constructive to think about what will happen when we get through this global crisis than it is to think too much about what happens if we do not.