https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/54246745

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/54246745

Goodbye to a lot of clubs then.

Have to agree. With government policy presently being an impossible aim of zero covid before any sort of normality returns, it's obvious that because most of us won't see a return to anything resembling what we were once used to within our lifetimes, so then most sports clubs reliant on spectators for income are absolutely doomed.

Sad times, but with a population that has been brainwashed into a state of fear, it is something that is totally inevitable and it will only be further down the line when we survey the wreckage of our society, that we might regret our inability to accept the need to treat this period with a common sense touch and not with one of panic.

You speak far too much common sense. It'll never take on.

This is getting ridiculous now. What is wrong with allowing a limited number in. Enough to give a couple of metres between each group, masks, staggered arrival times etc

I’d assumed that, given season ticket holders had already paid in advance for games this year, they would have been the ones invited to attend if people were allowed in. Not sure how that would provide a revenue boost?

So indoor pubs are ok but outdoor stadiums where people can socially distance are not. Makes perfect sense.

Another bewildering decision by these incompetent bunch of clowns. Up there with the; go to work, go to school, eat out help out, 50% off, go the pub. 'Oh look cases are rising', 'Work from home, shut the pubs at 10pm as the virus is now noctural, can't see any of your family, stay at home'. What a 5h1t show.

Seeing as there are many people who only drink in the evenings surely this could funnel more people into pubs at the same time in order to fit their quota of booze in. Wales for one is allowing till 11pm.

Seeing as season ticket holders have been given the chance to watch on the RL site ,it is glaringly obvious that the RFL have missed a chance to charge non season ticket holders to watch as pay to view customers. A tenner or £15 a game would have kept the money rolling in. It is increasingly likely that there will be no live spectator involvement this year.

is that because of the time difference?

Last time I checked, the time difference between Wales and the rest of the UK wasn't a hour - more like about 30 years.

Perhaps because the farmers have to tend to their sheep.

They are now saying it could be the end of March, that is bad for RL if that’s the case.

Strange that there were 600 people chanting, shouting and singing at Warrington Town last night, but Rugby League can’t have 1,000 people in a much bigger stadium with a much more professional set up?

Those darts nights can get a bit rowdy

Are none of the RFL bigwigs donors to the Conservative party?

Helps to get the wheels oiled when it comes to lobbying for changes to regulations.

The "rule of six" included very specific exemptions for "grouse shooting".

Sally, as you are somebody who has been pro-lockdown and all for the hiding away from this virus, despite it being blatantly obvious what damage that will do to society, it's interesting that you are seemingly now showing concern for the inevitable collapse of many sports clubs around the country.

Isn't the saying 'reap what you sow' ?...

I'm pro taking precautions on the balance of risk. When the hospitals were overwhelmed with covid cases like in March/April then it was sensible to have tight restrictions to get the caseload down to a level where it could be managed through isolating local outbreaks. Use government support (expensively) to keep the economy afloat till the caseload was down and then have a reopening with appropriate precautions (wearing masks, some distancing, increased cleaning, ventilation) to minimise the risk.

An effective test and trace system, run by public health experts and co-ordinated through local authorities, with the co-operation of the public, with powers to introduce local restrictions when outbreaks start, would have been able to keep the virus at a low enough level to allow more and more things to reopen.

Unfortunately the government has done a really poor job. They have used the pandemic response as a way to dish out huge sums of taxpayers money to favoured companies - eg Tory party donors or tech firms that Cummings has contacts with through previous campaigning. The PPE was a shambles because they didn't award the contracts to the best firms but to their own contacts. Test and trace in other countries is run by public health professionals - here they handed it over to a Conservative peer Dido Harding who is woefully out of her depth and so it has been a shambles. The apps never got off the ground and seem to have been more a way for Cummings to allow favoured tech firms access to peoples' personal data. They messed up a strategy on care homes during the peak of the pandemic because they were more bothered about the media handling and getting the numbers in hospitals down so the virus ripped through care homes and vulnerable elderly people were allowed to die out of sight.

They also lost the co-operation and trust of the public - which was there at the start - through Cummings being seen to have been able to break the rules. Also it doesn't help that social media disinformation campaigns (which they have tacitly encouraged when its been spreading misinformation about migrant rapists, Labour paedophiles and the EU wanting an army) have been saying the virus is all a myth, its 5G, Bill Gates wanting to implant chips in us which a lot of people believe and share on their facebooks hence all these anti-mask protestors.

As a result of the failure of test and trace, when they've tried to reopen things and the caseload has picked up again they have had to rely on the blunt instrument of local lockdowns, and are now warning of national lockdowns again as they can see the caseload following a similar trajectory to early February. We also had the stupid attempts to stoke a culture war by making a big deal about forcing people to go back to the office to try to create a battle with trade unions and rally their support base, but that hasn't even got off the ground before they've backtracked on it.

Just allowing it to rip through the population is not a credible option as when the hospitals get overly full we would get situations of people dying at home, unable to get in to hospitals, with their families stuck with their decomposing body for several days due to backlogs of being able to collect and dispose of the corpses. In that sort of scenario, you aren't going to get people turning out to rugby league matches even if there are no government restrictions.

So we're approaching where we were in March where there will need to be major lockdowns again and there's no sign the government will be able to get on top of the virus when the caseload drops again as the test and trace is still a complete shambles and it will be until they transfer it out of the hands of Dido and Serco and let the health experts run it the way they want to. So we'll be in this kind of destructive cycle for a while longer.

The pandemic would have been very difficult for any government and other countries with better governments and better health infrastructure than us are struggling too, but Boris and his cabal of hopeless suck-ups in Cabinet have been particularly unsuited to dealing with it. Had this happened a couple of years ago on Theresa May's watch I think some of the things would have been done better and she would have been better suited to leading in this situation and less motivated to sacrifice public health in pursuit of handing contracts to cronies.

Would assume that Sky would have an issue with games being shown PPV to non season ticket holders.

An excellent summary. There was a sign at a protest in the USA that read 'Trump, - we knew you'd be bad but fec k me' - you could replace Trump with Johnson. There is astonishing levels of theft from the public purse going on - but please look over there at the asylum seekers getting £30 a week.

The average age of a person dying from Covid is 82. Life expectancy in the UK is 81.

We have chose to destroy our society for it. Go figure.

I think the corruption of all these taxpayer-funded contracts going to Boris' cronies will end up being to him what the Iraq war became to Blair....less of an issue at the time it happened but after a few years when the public realise what happened he will be forever tarnished with it. Same with the housing secretary overruling Tower Hamlets council to get a Tory donor out of paying the levy on his development. This is the kind of dirty stuff that used to happen in European countries with corrupt politicians like Chirac in France or Berulosconi in Italy, where they had that kind of "nudge, wink" relationship with the electorate where people knew they were dodgy feckers but tolerated them for a while, but the UK was relatively free of it because of the strict rules in Whitehall (which Boris and his chums are tearing up under the guise of civil servants being 'enemies of the people').

The whole clash with the EU where they are ramming through that Bill to break their commitments in the Withdrawal Agreement, isn't about the Irish border or the EU "blockading food" like Boris is trying to say - its about being free from restrictions on State Aid (giving taxpayers money to private businesses) because Cummings wants to build his "British facebook", ie use taxpayers money to finance ventures from his tech industry pals.

In a few years time when everyones taxes go up and services are cut to pay for it and we're told "there's no money left" and they start finding out it was frittered away during Boris' days as PM in easy handouts to favoured donors they will go apepoop.

Johnson is like Trump but he's a lesser version of him and surprisingly weak in public performances. In the scenario which I suggested earlier where this had happened on Theresa May's watch, Boris would have been writing columns in newspapers taking the same position Dita's Slot Meter does on here, acting as the champion of "common sense" and "British freedoms" against the lockdown, because he'd be positioning for May's job. He was suited to that kind of outsider critique, he's not suited to being PM. He dithers about making decisions, then does something, mumbles about it when questioned, and U-turns later. I never liked him but thought he would have had a bit more personality and charisma about him as PM, but he's very weak in debates. I think the knives are being sharpened behind the scenes by some of his colleagues, notably Gove.

I’m not sure Sky would allow the RFL to make money from their live feeds. Let’s not forget, Superleague are not allowed to show any game live without the say so of Sky...

And it has also now been widely reported that Serco in turn have sub-contracted the work to dozens of smaller firms, some of whom have been involved in dodgy activity before, and others whose usual business in debt collecting.

Do you mean rather than a position that will, in the long term, cause far more health and social disaster than the virus itself ever will?

I actually agree with you over our ineffective government. Combined with an equally ineffective opposition and a gormless and easily manipulated population, we have all the ingredients for the absolute mess we are currently in and far from getting out of.

Out of curiosity, you often speak of not wanting this virus to 'rip' through our population - Do you seriously believe this hasn't already happened?

We currently have daily cases of over 6,000, with just over 30 daily deaths. Back in April, when testing was non existent and we had upto a 1,000 deaths a day, how many positive daily cases do you think there was?.. with the present figures, you could easily say it was well over 100,000 a day?

Like I have always maintained, we are hiding from a virus that behaves like flu. Kills the vulnerable, is an inconvenience to the vast majority. Our reaction to it, while predictable, begs the question of why we never react like this to flu and also suggests we can't ever return to normality, simply because we have set a precedent that any virus that kills must be hidden from and not lived with.