Borthwick to manage team remotely after new Covid outbreak
STEVE Borthwick will remotely manage Leicester Tigers from home during Sunday’s match against his former club Bath.
The Tigers head coach, right, is self-isolating along with other members of staff and players following the latest Covid-19 outbreak to hit the club.
While it forced the cancellation of the Boxing Day trip to Newcastle Falcons, Tigers have been able to fulfil the Gallagher Premiership round five visit of Bath to Mattioli Woods Welford Road.
“We’ve had several positive cases, last week, this week,” said Borthwick.
“We’ve had a couple of players who have not recovered well enough even though they are out of that isolation period. Not recovered well enough to be able to play this weekend. They’ll be right for next week.
“And then we have a number of players unavailable this week due to positive cases.
“The club acted swiftly as soon as we returned from France and received a positive case last week, the club was shut down immediately.
“The players were given the advice to stay at home, isolate at home, that has given us the best opportunity for us to be able to play the game this weekend.
“Clearly there has been individual training within the constraints that you can do right now that’s happened over the 10-day break period, and then two days team preparation to be ready to play.”
The Tigers squad has only trained together twice – Thursday and yesterday – ahead of the match because for the second time this season, following the Covid outbreak in November, the club was forced to temporarily close its training ground at Oval Park.
Borthwick said: “I think our experience of this now is that the players, whether it is training at home, training in the back garden, the players have been through this situation a few times and are able to do to the maximum of what they are able to do within the constraints and the environment they’re in.”
He added: “All of us are much more used now to working remotely and the manner in which you can do that effectively.
“So the players are well versed in that. Coaches are well versed in that, to maximise the preparation we can have, just done differently.
“Would we like more preparation on the field? Yes. Yes we would. But, that’s not happening, we knew it wasn’t going to happen, as soon as we shut training down over 10-12 days ago now, as soon as we shut training down, we knew we were only going to have a couple of days training going into this game.”
The former England coach did offer a sense of perspective to the situation Tigers are currently in.
“What I don’t want to do is talk unnecessarily about how tough this is,” he said.
“There’s a lot of people in the world in a worse situation than what we are in. Yes, I have been unable to go and coach this week which is disappointing and frustrating, but we get on with it.”