Cambuslang Rugby Club coach Alex Donaghy says Scottish Rugby scrapping the season is a blow – but hopes for a return so after getting bored of Zoom calls to colleagues.
Scottish Rugby pulled the plug on the domestic season on last week, over health and safety issues with regards to Covid-19 and travel and playing restrictions.
Donaghy said: “It’s a bit of a bummer, but if that’s the season finished then that’s it finished – the battle now is going to be trying to keep guys interested and at the club.
“I’m going to take the three weeks off now for Tier 4, hopefully after that we can get back to playing touch rugby and I’ll organise wee tournaments within the club to keep them interested and focused.
“It’s hard, because at the moment the clubhouse isn’t open, so you can’t even meet up to have a beer with the guys, talk to them and do your usual management stuff – and Zoom calls get boring.”
Donaghy admits that the season being scrapped means they’re not dangling a carrot in front of clubs, but worries about losing players with nothing to play for.
He said: “They’ve been dangling the carrot for us to say January and possibly March – just let us go now and that’s it done, and we can plan for next year.
“But we might lose a lot of players, because there’s nothing happening.
“They might do something else, or just retire.
“There would have been a lot of injuries if they had restarted in January.
“It was going to be too short of a pre-season with the restrictions we had, to get into it, when you consider they’ve had seven months off.
“Up until last week you could only do one-to-one tackling, but in six weeks’ time you want to do full-contact games - people were going to get hurt.
“There is a build-up to do this, and it’s going to take months to do.”
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