Warriors wait on Fusitu’a
Warriors coach Stephen Kearney has revealed how he plans to get the Warriors ready to start playing again in a few weeks, but said he could have to do it without two players.
David Fusitu’a and Nathaniel Roache may have to self-isolate when they get to Australia before joining up with the rest of the Warriors squad.
Fusitu’a, the NRL’s leading try scorer in 2018 didn’t fly out with the rest of the team to Tamworth on Sunday, staying back for personal reasons.
Roache felt unwell on Sunday morning, so it was decided he should undergo a coronavirus test. That test has come back negative.
But because they missed the chartered flight straight to Tamworth they could be subject to the same border requirements everyone else has to deal with when arriving in Australia.
That means being in isolation for 14 days and in the case of Fusitu’a it damages his chances of playing in the Warriors’ first game when the NRL season resumes from May 28.
‘‘We’ll work through that over the next week in terms of what potentially that may look like,’’ Kearney said from the team’s base in Tamworth yesterday.
‘‘He [Fusitu’a] may have to go into self-isolation in a hotel room so that’s obviously a worst-case scenario, which we’ve made him well aware of.
‘‘We’ll see if we can keep talking with the Australian Federal and state governments to see if we can help him out with that process.’’
Kearney said it was exciting for the club to be doing something so few professional teams in the world can do right now, which is to get ready to start playing.
‘‘We’ve been given the opportunity to participate in the competition,’’ he said.
‘‘If you look around the world at the moment, I don’t think there’s a sporting competition that will get up and running – we would be the first.
‘‘So in that sense, we do feel that comes with a huge responsibility on our part and the boys were made pretty clear about that responsibility this morning.
‘‘The focus for us now is to put that to the side. Our focus is on doing our job and that’s the mindset for us starting tomorrow.’’
When all the NRL clubs start training again this week, they’ll to have begin in groups of 10, including one trainer or coach.
Kearney acknowledged that it’s going to take time to get up to speed.
‘‘Six weeks without a great deal of ball work. We’ll start early on the fundamentals,’’ he said.
‘‘Catching and passing, we often take for granted, so we’ll start there first and try to fasttrack that as quickly as possible.
‘‘The physical part of the training, we want to make sure we get back into a physical state that helps us compete at NRL level.’’
The Warriors don’t know who or where they’ll play first when the NRL season resumes and Kearney said that it could be another week before they find out, but he hoped that later in the season the Warriors could play games in Auckland.
‘‘If we were to get some games at Mt Smart at the back end of the competition, that’d be good,’’ he said.
‘‘We’ll keep our fingers crossed that everyone does the right thing on both sides of the Tasman.
‘‘We might get to that stage.’’