COVID-19 response: New England rugby and Group 4 admit 'it's not looking good' for their seasons

The Central North Rugby Union executive will meet via Zoom on Friday night to discuss the situation, and will make a decision on the fate of its season when it meets with club presidents on Saturday.

Northern Inland Football, meanwhile, said it would be in contact with its clubs "regarding how the season will move forward".

While ALF North West plans at this stage to conduct a full finals series - albeit with reduced minutes for the major and minor semi-finals and the preliminary final.

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On Thursday, the state government announced that the lockdown had been extended by at least one week to August 28 following a continued high number of COVID cases in NSW.

On Friday, the state government announced that the greater Sydney lockdown had been extended to the end of September, after another 644 cases were recorded in NSW.

Psarakis said that even if the regional lockdown ended next week, the fact that players had not trained for several weeks would make resuming the season "very tough".

He said the deadline for staging finals was "pretty well" the end of September.

The options, he continued, included either premiers or minor premiers being decided based on round-12 table standings - the last round when every team played and the third-last round of the competition.

If the round-12 "premiers" option were activated, Narrabri would be crowned first-grade champions for the first time since 1990, although Psarakis said it was possible that there would be no premiers or minor premiers in 2021.

Another option, he continued, was first playing fourth and second playing third based on round-12 table standings, with the winners playing in the grand final. That scenario, he added, would only occur "if we've got some weeks available" to stage finals.

"The perfect one, obviously, is that we have the major semi and the minor semi and a grand final, but that's not looking very good at all," he said.

"And, basically, I don't know whether we can go past the last week in September. That's the problem we have with [availability] of grounds and with other sports [needing to use the grounds].

"So the clock's running out ... It's not looking good."

Group 4's 2020 season was abandoned before a match was played due to the pandemic.

The NERU executive will meet via Zoom on Monday night to decide the fate of the 2021 season.

However, NERU president David Clifton told the Leader on Friday morning that its season would almost certainly be abandoned two rounds out from the finals.

If that happened, minor premiers would be announced across all grades, he said.

Clifton believes that it will be impossible to restart the season because the NERU includes two university clubs: St Albert's College and Robb College.

If the lockdown ended on August 28 and universities reopened, students from areas outside Armidale would have to go into lockdown for a fortnight, he said.

"So that's basically put paid to our competition completely," he said, adding that the NERU has not made "an absolutely certain decision" yet.

He continued: "But I believe that our hands are tied. I don't believe that we will be able to continue with our competition.

"Because if we go too far into September, we're into university examination time and so on, and the students would have left by that time [post-exams].

"It's highly unlikely now that they will come back [to uni] - they can do their exams online and they can do their lectures online and so on."

Central North Rugby Union president Paul King said he did not want to "pre-empt anything" regarding the fate of the CNRU's season.

"At the end of the day, it will come down to what clubs are telling us," he said, adding: "But at this point we're in the third [and final] stage of our current [COVID response] plan."

Under the stage-three scenario, King said, the CNRU would "regroup " and "make another plan to go forward that works within the boundaries" of the state government's COVID measures.

The 2020 CNRU season was abandoned due to the pandemic.

If the lockdown ends on August 28, the AFL North West would stage finals over the following three weekends - culminating in grand final day on September 18, its president, Sonia Martin, said.

An extension of the lockdown, Martin added, would result in a further assessment on how to proceed as part of a "rolling plan".

"And probably the biggest variable from here, apart from timeframes, is that lack of [player] fitness [due to the lockdown]," she said.

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