AFL 2020 season will resume on June 11: McLachlan
AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan has confirmed that the 2020 season will resume on Thursday, June 11 - 81 days after it was shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Clubs will begin training on Monday as preparations for the season restart ramp up.
The fixture revamped fixture will be released in blocks of four to six weeks, with the first block of matches to be announced over next 10 days.
McLachlan denied that heavyweights Richmond and Collingwood would definitely kick off round two, and while he didn’t rule out the prospect of clubs playing more than one game a week, he indicated that, at this stage, each of the remaining rounds of footy would be played out over the orthodox timeframe of Thursday to Sunday.
“Broadly the plan now is we will play a pretty consistent structure with the way it’s been – we’ll keep to our slots, we’ll play one game a week,” he told 3AW on Friday.
“That doesn’t mean at some point when things evolve, because we need to be agile, we won’t compress – we have the ability to, we have the willingness from the clubs and the players.”
West Coast and Fremantle will complete their "mini pre-seasons" in Perth before relocate to a hub on the Gold Coast, along with Adelaide and Port Adelaide, for an initial period of at least four weeks.
Players from WA and SA clubs will be able to host family members, and that will be funded by the AFL. Adelaide and Port Adelaide will relocate before May 25. Clubs will be permitted to partake in full contact training twice a week from May 25 after coronavirus testing has finished, giving teams four sessions each in the lead-up to the season restart.
“We’ll be training for a few weeks, enough to make sure the players and the clubs and the coaches feel that they’ve had the right body of work to play matches without significant risk of injury,” McLachlan told 3AW.
“We’ve got a hybrid model that’ll see some games flying in and out, some in villages, it will have to be agile and flexible to take us forward.”
Quarters will almost certainly stay at 16 minutes plus time on, as they were in round one, for the remainder of the season.
McLachlan said players would be tested twice a week for coronavirus on an ongoing basis.
The league will be paying for the Gold Coast hub and while it will be an expensive undertaking, McLachlan said it may not ultimately cost the league as much as they think it might at this point in time.
“It’s what we need to do to deliver on the health and wellbeing of our players, our officials and deliver on our responsibility to the community,” he said.
McLachlan didn’t rule out the chance of crowds returning to the grounds in some form or another this year, either.
“I know that it’s less likely than likely, but I reckon it’s in the hands of the community [and] how well we continue to socially distance and be disciplined as things open up,” he said.
With the grand final likely taking place at the end of October, McLachlan emphasised that Marvel Stadium could be used if needed in the event that the MCG was unavailable if the Twenty20 World Cup went ahead as planned.
The Northern Territory had been speculated upon as a potential host of the grand final, as restrictions are easing there rapidly compared to most parts of Australia, but McLachlan poured cold water on the prospect of playing any games in the Top End, let alone the premiership decider.
“The challenge up there is they have a strict quarantine coming in,” he said.
“If you want to take teams up there, they have to have been in quarantine before, I think, or potentially in there for 14 days ... but as we know things are changing.”