NRL players are set to face as many as six Covid tests a week when clubs re-form after their Christmas breaks.
According to Paul Crawley ofย The Daily Telegraph, these new league-mandated measures have been crafted in an effort to stymy any possibility of mass infections ahead of the third straight virus-affected season.
While the competition is yet to see a surge in sidelinings due to any strain of the airborne disease, a trifecta of clubs in South Sydney, Canberra and Newcastle have already had portions of their pre-season training period hindered due to positive test results.
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Although the compliance of players and officials has so far allowed the 2020 and 2021 seasons to be completed without a plethora of names entering inactive lists, the likelihood of another spike in community infections has the ability to create headaches.
Incumbent New South Wales Minister for Health Brad Hazzard has previously stated he expects as many as 25,000 new cases to arise each day in January, and given the free rein league players currently have to move within regular society, there remains a likelihood that further cases of contraction will originate.
While a complete Covid elimination is currently an impossibility, NRL CEO Andrew Abdo explained that the move to raise testing numbers will be introduced to create safer working environments.
โIt will be much more focussed on prevention and early detection,โ Abdo stated.
โSo it will be all based on rapid testing before any training session or any time players and officials come together as a group.
โThat way we can make sure that we donโt have big portions of the club, or potentially the whole club, going down in a close contact or as a contact situation.โ
Although Abdo also stressed that he held hope that the 'bubbles' of the past pair of campaigns would not be required in 2022, the league boss claimed that keeping players on the park was his main concern prior to the festive season.
โFor us, continuity of the competition is going to be critical again," he continued.
โIt is going to be another challenging year where we are going to have to be using all measures available to make sure we keep everyone safe and we donโt lose games and we donโt lose large groups of players.
โI think the whole playing group and the clubs have shown a lot of discipline to the protocols we put in place and I am sure regular testing will be no different.โ
It is not yet known whether any of these measures will have to ability to halt training programs or trial contests when club's summer programs resume in the new year.
