Saddened! wrote:
Warrington have announced this week they have 12 healthy first team players in training. So you only need 5 academy players to make a squad. Saints will be the same, although possibly the nature of cup win celebrations meant the whole squad had to isolate. But if that's the case, it should be given as a walkover as we haven't taken the protocols seriously enough.
But what if all 12 of those are forwards?
I don't think its right to put 5 academy players alongside a 12 strong first team squad (those 12 could include younger players such as Wrench, Longstaff, Doro, Thewlis as well). Lets not forget that the academy teams didn't play at all last year and only played a handful of games this year, with no reserve team. You think they should be thrown en masse into a first team environment with no previous exposure to the first team? When we played Salford away last year with a very inexperienced squad, we were still in the main fielding first team squad players, I think there were only 2 academy players in there. We have a much smaller squad this year. It just doesn;t make sense to the play the game, whether it fits your agenda or not.
Some of these fixtures may be possible to play at a later date, but probably not all of them. Sky are interested in getting their allocated matches per season, that is what they are getting. Football (and probably Union clubs to an extent) may well be able to take a hit of players isolating with bigger squads. They also may be able to take the NRL approach of a bubble. As you say, it will be interesting to see the impact there, if cases are as high - but given there will be new rules by then on isolation we probably wont get to see a like for like comparison.