Grand plan The snap decision that saved the NRL season

ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys believes the NRL season would not have been completed had they waited just one week longer to move it to Queensland.

The grand final is increasingly likely to be staged at Suncorp Stadium on Sunday after another day of encouraging COVID-19 numbers in Queensland. Just two new locally acquired cases were detected on Saturday as the state tries to control a minor outbreak. However, the fate of the showpiece event will be determined by infection numbers on the morning of the game.

If Queensland doesn’t go into a snap lockdown, the game will proceed as scheduled, so long as the crowd capacity isn’t reduced below 50 per cent. As it stands, Suncorp can use 75 per cent of its seating, which would result in 39,000 spectators witnessing the first NRL grand final outside Sydney.

The NRL is determined to play the game in front of a crowd, meaning the decider would be postponed rather than played in front of an empty stadium.

V’landys wasn’t prepared to declare a Suncorp grand final over the line, but said the signs were good.

“It’s all good today, but we’ve still got Sunday,” he said. “If they have a case they can’t trace, that’s the problem. At this stage, all systems go for 75 per cent. The fact there was none [unconnected cases] today, it’s looking promising.”

Rival grand final coaches Ivan Cleary and Wayne Bennett front the media for the final time.Credit:Getty

The NRL relocated its nine Sydney-based clubs â€" as well as the Knights, Raiders and Newcastle â€" in mid-July due to rising infection rates in NSW. The shift came at significant expense, estimated at between $12 million and $15 million a month, although it remains a relatively small price in the context of the NRL’s contractual commitments to broadcasters.

V’landys believes the season would likely not have been completed had the NRL delayed the decision by just a week.

“Once we moved to Queensland, most of our problems went away,” he said. “There’s no doubt that if we had stayed here [in NSW], I’d be surprised if we would have got through the competition.

“You’ve got to remember that we put players in bubbles, but they still have their families there. The families still go to the supermarket, the kids still go to school. That’s how you catch COVID, it’s the close contacts.

“I reckon there would have been a lot of positives [COVID cases]. The best decision we did was to move early and quickly, and we did that. That eradicated a lot of the risk.

“At the time, a lot of people thought I was mad, but I was tracing it two weeks before. I kept ringing Andrew [Abdo, NRL chief executive] and saying, ‘Mate, this is getting worse, we need to be ready to pull the trigger’.

“And we did. I think we timed it perfectly.”

On Saturday, Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said a day is a “long time in COVID”, but it would take an unexpected spike in infections for the Panthers-Rabbitohs decider not to be played at Suncorp Stadium. She said there would be pop-up vaccination clinics around the venue for people looking to get inoculated before the game.

Despite the rising number of people who have been double-vaccinated, V’landys said COVID-19 would make staging next year’s competition just as challenging as the 2021 season.

“I don’t think next year is going to be any easier,” he said. “The problem you have got is that even if you’re vaccinated, you can still catch it.

“The problem we had in racing, to give you an example, we had two jockeys who were double vaccinated and they showed no symptoms whatsoever, and they still haven’t after 14 days. But they had COVID and they could have passed it onto someone else.

“What saved us there is the rapid antigen tests that we had in racing. We were one of the first to do it and we’ll be doing it in rugby league next year, that will be the saviour.

“They pick up the positives, even if you have no symptoms. [The turnaround] is 15 minutes.”

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