Rugby Championship in disarray as Covid hits six more Pumas
The difficult just got near impossible, with the mooted New Zealand-based Rugby Championship dealt what shapes as a fatal blow by the latest Covid19 revelations out of Argentina.
Argentina’s national rugby union announced yesterday that six members of the Pumas squad had just tested positive for Covid19 and been immediately placed in isolation. The news plunges the planned rearranged four-nations championship into the highly unlikely category.
Argentina are due to join the hosts, Australia and South Africa in a revamped Rugby Championship to be staged entirely in New Zealand in November and December, government health regulations allowing.
Western Australia has also been put forward as a potential base for the championship.
With the re-emergence of the virus in New Zealand and the Government’s latest raft of alert level restrictions in place until at least September 17, the staging of the event in this country had already entered problematic territory.
But Argentina’s situation could prove a death knell. Not only will the squad’s preparations be
severely compromised by the need to isolate, quarantine and evaluate around their own health situation, but there will be major concerns around admitting them into New Zealand, or Australia for that matter, amid so many positive tests for the virus.
South America has been badly hit by the coronavirus, with Argentina reporting thousands of new cases every day.
‘‘After completing a new batch of PCR tests, in order to minimise the risk of contagion and be able to start the health bubble, the results yielded six positive cases of Covid-19 in the campus,’’ said Argentina Rugby. ‘‘All of them [are] asymptomatic and already fulfilling preventive isolation.
‘‘They are the players Juan Cruz Mallı´a, Emiliano Boffelli, Bautista Delguy, Rodrigo Ferna´ndez Criado, Bautista Pedemonte and Lucas Bur.’’
Argentina had previously announced that forward Javier Ortega Desio had returned a positive test for Covid-19 prior to the squad assembling for their training camp.
New Zealand Rugby is desperate to stage test matches in 2020 as they look to stem a crippling revenue dropoff caused by the global pandemic.
The plan had been to play a couple of Bledisloe Cup tests against the Wallabies, most probably in Australia, in October, before staging the Rugby Championship over a six-week period in November and December this side of the Tasman.
But the health situation in both New Zealand and Australia had already made that scenario highly unlikely, with Government officials in both countries taking a hardline approach in their quest to combat the deadly virus.
Now it might just be an impossible dream.