Covid spike puts Top 14 on high alert
An abundance of caution marked professional rugby’s preseason return on Friday, 166 days after Toulon beat Stade Francais by a single point in what turned out to be the final game of the ill-fated 2019/20 season.
Agen, Lyon, Provence, Carcassonne, Montpellier, and Stade Francais, paused training due to health scares in recent weeks.
Stade’s situation has been the most worrying. A number of players and staff returning from a training camp in Nice tested positive for the virus, prompting the club to halt group training and place the entire sporting staff in confinement.
The club’s general manager Thomas Lombard told Le Figaro that tests on Friday showed they had contained the outbreak. Further tests will take place tomorrow.
There’s a lot the league and clubs cannot control, but they are locking things down as tightly as they can with just three weeks left before the Top 14 and ProD2 seasons kick off.
A 79-page protocol document from the LNR dictates what clubs and players must and cannot do during this block of pre-season games – and into the scheduled opening round of matches.
Players are kept in a bubble, as much as possible, and are well informed about the risks they face if they do not take precautions outside that bubble. It’s fair to say the precautions are taken seriously. They are professionals – and this is their job.
They are tested weekly at the clubs. And they must return a negative test carried out within 72 hours of a match before they can play. But risks remain.
Predicting what happens between now and next week, let alone nearly three weeks from now, is impossible, but Racing 92’s attack coach Mike Prendergast told The Rugby Paper:
“We’ve got to take confidence from other competitions that have started – in soccer and rugby – all over the world.
“Everyone’s trying to do their best to make it happen. It’s not too far around the corner, and that’s put a bigger focus on it. When it’s that close, coaches and players will be more cautious because they don’t want to be the ones who can’t play.”
Prendergast’s opposite number at Lyon, Kendrick Lynn, was more cautious: “I hope that we can start as scheduled. But sometimes you’ve got to take a step back and be logical and realistic about it. All it takes is for one team to be shut down and that affects the whole league.”
Lyon and Racing are due to play a pre-season friendly on Friday, August 21 – an interesting pre-cursor to the opening weekend of the season, when they meet again with early bragging rights at stake.
Lynn and Lyon have had to deal with a health scare, after three players tested positive for coronavirus. Strict protocols slammed quickly into place. Those players went into self-isolation, the rest of the squad slipped back to smaller-group distance training.
“We were tested while we were on a week’s break,” Lynn said. “Originally we had three tests come back positive, but one of those turned out to be a false positive. The other two were asymptomatic.
“They were automatically quarantined for two weeks. Everyone who had been in contact with any of the three at that stage also got quarantined as a precaution. They had to get tested twice and be negative twice before they could come back.
“We had to go back to no balls, no passing, we went back to small groups, basically gym work and fitness. The guys could do a little bit of individual skill work by themselves.
“It was a real halt to the momentum of preseason – we had a week when we had to shut down, basically.”
It was a blow, and it’s easy to focus on the negatives. But both Lynn and Prendergast noted silver linings on the coronavirus cloud.
Lynn said: “There was a little bit of variance in how some of the guys came out of it (lockdown). At the same time they did manage to get a few weeks of base fitness under their belt, which you often don’t get in France. The lads had the chance to let their bodies regenerate a bit by not playing for so long.”
Prendagast added: “We came back with nearly everybody intact. A couple of niggles here and there, but nothing serious. I’m sure coaches in every club set up good programmes in terms of what the players could do at home.
“We were very vigilant in terms of training – we knew we were starting at a base that we probably hadn’t started before. We’d great information from our doctors on what to do and how to train.”
There’s a huge amount clubs, players, and league cannot control, as the number of cases of coronavirus spikes in France. But clubs and players know the score.
And, on the inside looking out, it seems there’s a certain quiet – if understandably cautious – confidence. As Prendergast said: “There are times when you can be very unlucky. All you can do is try to control your own group and control the controllables.”