Premiership season may be completed at Twickenham
Matt Lawton, Alex Lowe
Saturday April 18 2020, 12.01am, The Times
The option of completing the Premiership Rugby season by playing all the remaining games at Twickenham is gathering support among the clubs, The Times understands.
Premiership chiefs have considered a number of possible contingency plans but club executives believe the use of a single venue is making an increasing amount of sense when there remains so much uncertainty about what will be possible during the coronavirus crisis.
Reducing travelling for clubs, the time required to complete the games and the demands on public resources as well as on broadcasters has been central to discussions in the past week.
The option being considered is to play as many as three matches on any given day, with a mixture of games in midweek and at the weekend, almost certainly behind closed doors. Teams, when required to be in Twickenham, would stay at the stadium’s 156-room Marriott Hotel.
The hybrid Twickenham pitch would be able to cope with that level of use required to finish the season.
Using the stadium for multiple games would limit travel and lessen the demands on personnel and broadcasters. Indeed, there is even the option of installing remote-controlled cameras around the ground and having them linked to and operated at BT’s studio centre in Stratford.
The Ricoh Arena in Coventry is also believed to be under consideration. The Wasps stadium has a hotel and facilities for remote camera operators.
Premiership Rugby has said that it intends to complete the top-flight season despite stipulating that it must recommence by early July, with matches likely to be behind closed doors.
In normal circumstances, that equates to 11 weekends of rugby — 54 regular season games, plus two semi- finals and a final. However, if the clubs can resume playing by early July, then they believe that they can have a Twickenham final in the middle of August.
The Rugby Players’ Association wrote to its members yesterday outlining the five stages of rugby’s return “all of which will be driven by government policy”, beginning with individual training and then team training.
PRL is believed to have been provisionally working towards a return-to-play date of June 27, although it decided against going public with that target.
Players from at least one Premiership club have been told that re-launching the season on June 27 would mean a return to training on May 18, initially in small groups and then as a full squad from June 1.
Resuming the season on June 27 would mean the Premiership final being put back to August 15. If the suspension is lifted on May 9 and fixtures resume on June 27, after a period of pre-season, it would be possible for all remaining games to be completed if the clubs agreed to stage three midweek fixtures.
Topic: Ricoh perhaps? (Read 1301 times)
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