THE best football coaches always have Plans B, C and even D up their sleeve… and football administrators have learnt quickly to do the same when building a fixture list in the midst of a pandemic.
That’s why league officials remain confident that the 218 A-League and W-League games scheduled for this season will be played over the next six months, even as they rejig the opening few rounds to allow for the latest coronavirus outbreak and its effects on domestic travel.
Administrators have waited as anxiously as anyone for the daily updates on the Northern Beaches COVID-19 outbreak, which has caused border closures just days out from the start of the new A-League and W-League seasons.
But contingency planning based on how the A-League season was completed months ago has already allowed for a swift reversion to an effective “conference system” in the men’s competition, splitting the league in two for the first month in the hope border restrictions will have lifted by then.
It means that of the opening 40 A-League games, for instance, only half have had to be postponed, with 15 left unchanged and five brought forward from later in the season.
Once it became clear at the weekend that the outbreak in NSW would prompt other states to close their borders or implement quarantine measures, A-League boss Greg O’Rourke led a rapid reshuffle of the fixtures lists, pitting A-League teams in NSW against each other for the first month – including Wellington at their temporary Wollongong HQ – while the other six clubs across the rest of the country similarly will play each other.
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The W-League reformat will be finalised within a day or two, but has already included moving the Sydney derby to Round 1 – allowing the leagues to kick off with a derby doubleheader at Bankwest Stadium.
“We had already built versions of the draws to allow for one state to be quarantined, though at the time Victoria looked the most likely,” O’Rourke said.
“There are a few ‘release valves’ throughout the draw – we had Wellington travelling to Brisbane in Round x, for instance, because Phoenix would not have been affected by other states putting restrictions on the Greater Sydney area.
“But then the Queensland government included the Central Coast and the Wollongong region in their restrictions, so we’ve had to move things around a bit further.”
The hope is that teams will be able to travel normally by the end of January, but a variety of worsening scenarios have been mapped out in case events move in the opposite direction.
That includes a temporary full lockdown, or long-term travel restrictions, O’Rourke revealed. “We all hope that things will be back to ‘normal’ soon, but if we were to lose a few weeks of the season, we have built the draw to be able to switch to a simple home and away structure if need be,” he said.
All of that is a long way off, and for now the only focus is manoeuvring through the next few weeks – including daily challenges that are unforeseeable.
“But we have six months to play all our games, and with the measures we have in place, we’re as confident as we can be that 2020-21 will be a complete success,” ‘O’Rourke said.
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