Havant RFC coach ready for ‘big challenge’ ahead of league games resuming this autumn

The RFU have published the 2020/21 fixture lists already with a start date of September 5, but Knight feels a start date of Saturday, October 10, is far more likely.

The RFU have broken some of their grassroots divisions into two geography-determined conferences.

In London & SE Premier, for example, newly-promoted Havant - the club won the London 1 South title in 2019/20 - have been grouped with Brighton, Sevenoaks, Westcombe Park, Sutton & Epsom, Dorking and Tunbridge Wells.

In the ‘north’ half of their division are North Walsham, Wimbledon, Hertford, Maidenhead, Sidcup, Tring and Chiswick-based CS Stags 1863.

There are three ‘blocks’ of games - an initial round of 12 matches (home and away against the other six teams in their group) followed by two blocks of seven.

If rugby cannot return until the sixth weekend of block 1 fixtures, the first game will be the fixture listed for the sixth round (on October 10) - NOT the first one (on September 5). If that is the case, after the 14th round the scheduled fixtures the first five rounds would then be played in order, completing the first window of games.

After that, Havant’s first block of seven games are against each of the north clubs - Havant have four at home and three away.

A second block of seven games see the fixtures in the first block reversed.

The best case scenario is a full season of 26 league games, and if 2020/21 began on October 10 that would still leave 34 Saturdays between then and the end of May in which to play them.

Normally, the county championships are staged in May but they have already been cancelled for 2021 - freeing up more time for the league season to be completed if needs be.

Knight believes the fixture list is a ‘fairly sensible solution’, but fears any start later than October could create issues around pre-season training.

‘We’re starting training this week.’ said Knight. ‘That feels about right - I know some clubs have already started and they think they might have gone back too early.

‘At the moment we can only work in groups of six with a coach on a quarter of a pitch.

‘To start with we’ll have 20 forwards and four coaches training on a Tuesday for an hour and a bit, and on Thursday we’ll have the backs training.

‘I have said to the players that we’ll treat these first few weeks as a ‘pre’ pre season conditioning block, we wouldn’t normally have the chance to do that.’

Knight added: ‘The problem we have is that nobody really knows when the season will start.

‘Our boys love their fitness work, but there’s only so much you can do …

‘Trying to maintain our momentum - or certainly trying not to lose it - is going to be a big challenge if we can’t start until November or later.’

The RFU have said that there will be four Saturdays for pre-season matches before league fixtures can begin.

‘We’ve got friendlies in place,’ said Knight. ‘It’ll just be a case of fitting them into actual dates when we know when we’re starting again.’