AND THERE GOES the last tentpole of the rugby season as we knew it.
July’s Test schedule, though clearly sinking from the day the Six Nations ran aground, finally succumbed to the pandemic waves.
Japan will have to keep going without seeing England and Wales. New Zealand have Super Rugby in the blocks to soften the blow of losing the visit of Scotland. There’ll be no tour to Australia for Ireland.
We could have stirred the memory of the 2018 series (when all was right with Irish rugby), Peter O’Mahony’s aerial duel with Israel Folau, the end of a winning streak and a first series win Down Under.
There are only head-spinning mental gymnastics in store if we were to attempt to imagine what the series would have looked like. Would we have seen more of Caelan Doris and Ronan Kelleher flourishing in green? A debut for Billy Burns, Will Connors or Tom O’Toole… players are not even training at present, so forecasting who could, would or should have earned a nod to face the Wallabies is a warren of arguments with no wrong answers.
For Andy Farrell, it is another lost opportunity to put his stamp on the team. The new head coach has presided over three matches since taking over from Joe Schmidt, but he will be doing well to double that tally by the time we mark a year since the Kiwi’s last act.
The Tests once scheduled for July are all merely postponed as things stand, of course. If we learned anything from the sporting shutdown in March it’s that governing bodies are loathe to bring a halt to sport even in the teeth of a pandemic.
For rugby, international Test matches are the richest of revenue streams and the embattled Rugby Australia are not alone in seeking to reschedule the fixtures in another window.
And yet something has to give.
The two or three, depending on the nation, matches postponed from July are now flung on the growing fixture backlog pile. The remnants of the 2020 Six Nations is there alongside it, the Champions Cup too. The stack becomes an extremely daunting one when we take a step back and take in the lost domestic matches.
Even if we assume that rugby is ready and able to resume across the globe from September, unless a blind eye is turned on player welfare and a few very quick turnarounds are imposed on teams between matches there is a slender amount of time where the game can balance its pre-Coronavirus commitments with the need to move on to whatever the 2020/21 season will look like.
Next season, it is worth remembering, is scheduled to run on (and on) until 7 August 2021 when the Lions are due to play a third Test against the Springboks.
Perhaps we would be naive to suggest supporters will be reluctant to follow the combined team in South Africa next summer, but a pandemic and recession combined will surely leave a dent in demand. Even the most passionate, red-jersey buying, friendships-that-last-a-lifetime-swallowing fan might waver on the tour’s attractiveness if it features players who have had to play a gruelling season-and-a-half in one.
American sports are each devising a work-around to box off their 2020 seasons with ‘bubbles’ and limited sites featuring prominently for basketball and soccer, while baseball will reportedly play out the year with the number of games halved. Rugby has long embraced a different sort of bubble, but ploughing ahead as if the pandemic never happened – save for a backdrop of empty seats – is a foolhardy plan to enter the foreseeable future with.
Arguments would ensue, financial pills would be bitter and almost as eye-watering as a swab for Covid-19, but dredging up a doomed season is no way to steady the ship for 20/21.
