Lancashire RFU

Yesterday’s RFU announcement that the game can start to return to play under adaptive rules have raised one or two questions that have been shunted in our direction. The full answer is………… we haven’t got a clue, and hopefully further information will be disseminated by our National Governing Body later today (01/12) or after Lockdown ends. We do know some of the more obvious issues which are as follows.

Dependent on what Tier you are in access to facilities will be limited. This has the impact of whether you want to run around on a muddy field before going back home to shower! We think some form of staggered plan on changing/shower usage will come in force.
Again dependent on Tiers Clubs will NOT be able to travel outside of their Tier to a Club in a lower Tier, i.e Tier 3 to Tier 2 is no-no and vice versa. With a couple of exceptions, the ADM Micro Leagues have allowed for localised within Tier travel which is being kept to a minimum.

Clubs can decide not to Travel and that is solely up to individual Clubs, safety must be the number 1 priority.

From our point of view we targeted the 16th January as our hoped for starting point of the Micro Leagues and our Combination Leagues, indeed the Combi Fixtures were updated mid-November with a revised Week 1 start of the 16th! Either we have got good at predicting the future or someone is using our forward planning as a template, this week’s lottery numbers are…….

Our opinion is that if we are allowed to open up facilities in some way we would suggest Clubs don’t steam back in arranging games and suggest we get use to the new laws (See Attached) and look to arrange some practice games on the 2nd and 9th January again dependent on the Tier status and guidance from the RFU.

Will we start on the 16th January? Possibly, there’s a lot of sanitised water to flow under the bridge first but the first few steps toward a return to our game are being made.
We will update Clubs as soon as we hear from the RFU and Lancashire RFU, for the time being stay safe.

LMC 01/12/2020