Covid clouds hopes for ‘normal’ Six Nations and Champions Cup
The festive season is over and for rugby’s administrators a pivotal month awaits. Covid infection rates and strict travel regulations are threatening to disrupt the start of the 2022 Six Nations championship and the European club pool stages with crucial talks between unions and governments in full swing this week. A nervous, knife-edge January looms.
What, say, are the odds on thousands of English and Welsh fans being encouraged to travel en masse to Edinburgh and Dublin, respectively, for round one of the Six Nations in just over four weeks’ time? Or being sufficiently free of Omicron to do so? With no slack in rugby’s absurdly congested fixture calendar, the games are set to go ahead as scheduled but no one can be sure how many spectators will be present.
Despite the strict crowd restrictions now in place across Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Six Nations organisers insist it is premature to speculate about staging games behind closed doors. But as things stand, only 500 people are allowed at outdoor sports events in Scotland while in Ireland the maximum figure is 5,000. While hopes are high for an improved situation by March and April, unleashing thousands of travelling Six Nations fans next month may undermine that ambition.
In France, moreover there have been other significant developments. Not only have crowd sizes been limited to just 5,000 outside and 2,000 inside for the next three weeks – coinciding with rounds three and four of the Champions Cup – but stricter measures around vaccination are set to come into effect from 15 January.
From Saturday week it will be a requirement in France to show a vaccine pass to attend a game as a spectator, official, staff member or, significantly, as a player. No longer, as things stand, will unvaccinated individuals be allowed in on the basis of a recent negative Covid test. Which means some high-profile players on both sides of the Channel will have to get themselves jabbed or they will not be welcome inside the ground, let alone the field of play.
It is clearly a potential game-changer for some. Premiership Rugby says 96% of their players and management are now double vaccinated while the comparable figure in France is said to be 98%. With expanded player squads eligible for Europe this season, however, that still leaves several dozen individuals unvaccinated and, barring a softening of the rules, unavailable.
What will this mean for those clubs with big European pool games in France over the next fortnight? Bath, Sale and Scarlets are all in France for Champions Cup fixtures next weekend and Cardiff, Connacht, Northampton and Exeter are due to travel across the Channel in round four. Newcastle are also due to play Challenge Cup games in Biarritz and Toulon on successive weekends; what a perfect working holiday that might have been in other circumstances but, on cost grounds, Falcons plan to commute to both games rather than stay put.
At least one of the aforementioned teams, the Guardian understands, are in the clear because 100% of their players are fully vaccinated. Which places them in a different league from some other sports. Before Christmas the English Football League revealed that 25% of its players did not intend to get a vaccine, with only 59% already double vaccinated. Let’s just say the unvaccinated minority might be wise to hesitate before accepting an 11th-hour January transfer window offer from France.
Back on planet rugby logistical talks have been continuing. Some interesting contingency plans have also been floated. There have even been discussions about moving affected games to another country, possibly Ireland, though nothing has yet been rubber-stamped. Would something such as that be feasible? Imagine if multiple teams and their entourages were holed up in the same hotel bar for 10 days? Fun but possibly not exactly what the doctor ordered.
Then again, if infection rates keep rising across Europe over the next fortnight, who knows? The testing uncertainty was already mounting even before the most recent Premiership screening figures were announced. Between Christmas Eve and 30 December 4,446 lateral flow and PCR tests were taken by Premiership players and management as part of the league’s Covid-19 screening programme. No fewer than 55 people from 11 clubs tested positive, while Bath’s first game of the year, away at London Irish on Monday, was called off after a “significant number” of their playing squad were ruled out.
It was a reminder that, in the great scheme of things, rugby cannot entirely control its own destiny. The financial drip-drip effect of all this disruption is also increasingly hard to ignore. The tightened salary cap is already squeezing player salaries and employment opportunities and clubs badly need the matchday income that has latterly been flowing back.
To see 70,000-plus tickets sold for the Big Game at Twickenham last week was to be forcibly reminded of what the past two Premiership finals have lacked – and what the Six Nations again risks losing. To attend the Exeter v Bristol game on New Year’s Day was also to experience the stark contrasts in health and safety interpretations around the UK. No one checked any of our family’s Covid passes on the way in, barely 20% of the 14,100 attendance were masked and our narrow, cheek-by-jowl seats behind the posts made social distancing a forlorn dream.
Was it: a) an enticing vision of an imminent “normal” life or b) a superspreader paradise? Rugby’s custodians can only pray the former wins the day.
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