Today's news follows the Government's announcement on Thursday that professional rugby and netball could resume at alert level 2.
COMMENT:
On Monday morning, it will become apparent which Super Rugby players have been sitting on the couch these past six weeks eating chips and working their way through the box sets.
Almost certainly quite a few will have lost their way: been half-hearted in their attempts to maintain theirconditioning and mentally destroyed by the uncertainty of the lockdown.
They will report back for Super Rugby duty heavier than they should, slower than they were and lacking the general fitness expected.
The lockdown for some will be an Everest they couldn't climb and while it won't kill their careers as such, it will leave them tainted – a secret black mark against their name to indicate they didn't have the resilience to stay the course during self-isolation.
The lockdown, as curious as this may sound, will have put players under as much, if not more pressure than a World Cup. It will have challenged the self-discipline, commitment and motivation of every player in the country and how well everyone coped will become apparent.
The toughest will have found a means to plot their way through the last seven weeks and emerge physically ready and emotionally charged to play when Super Rugby resumes on June 13.
Others will be mentally drained and in urgent need of remedial conditioning work which will delay their return to action.
The last seven weeks have been a hiatus like no other. A mid-season pre-season, but with the added problem that for much of it, no one has had any real idea when it would all end.
Professional athletes are highly calibrated creatures and their worlds need certainty, structure and routine to function. They haven't had that for almost two months and the experience will have broken quite a few and it will be a fascinating period to see who thrived and who didn't in lockdown.
The findings may be surprising and new All Blacks coach Ian Foster will be the most intrigued observer to see what intel he can glean as he restarts the process of determining who will make his squad when test football resumes later this year.
All Blacks coach Ian Foster might not want to look at how some of his players have dealt with the lockdown. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Seeing how players have dealt with the lockdown will be a handy guide to determining how well equipped they are to deal with the pressures of test football.
Almost certainly there will be some highly promising players who return to Super Rugby and go splat. Whatever form they were in before the lockdown, they won't get anywhere near recovering it.
There will be others who we never imagined had much to offer who are suddenly grabbing our attention – re-inventing themselves as possible test players.
What is beyond question is that Foster is going to have to be prepared to redraw his selection plans. It may be that some of the prospects he was hoping to pick this year don't emerge the way he hoped post lockdown.
He would have been starting to piece together his selection plans when Super Rugby went into lockdown. A reasonable component of his likely squad would already have been locked in given their experience and proven quality.
Others such as David Havili would have grabbed his attention, as perhaps might have Crusaders blindside Cullen Grace, Blues No 8 Hoskins Sotutu and Chiefs openside Lachlan Boshier.
If the season had run its natural course, those players, and whomever else the selectors had identified as being of interest, would have come under intense scrutiny to see how they coped as the pressure increased.
That scrutiny is now going to come as soon as Super Rugby kicks off. Those players who start well will be sending a message that they held it all together during the lockdown.
Nothing is certain at this stage, but the odds are shortening that this year's entire All Blacks test programme will be a Bledisloe Cup series.
The where, when and number of tests will depend on how restrictions lift.
The logistics may be uncertain but the enormity of the challenge is clear.
A test series against the Dave Rennie-coached Wallabies at the end of a uniquely disrupted season will be as tough an assignment as a Lions series.
The hype will be be extreme and the expectation, even in the All Blacks world where it's always there, will be unusually high.
Those who didn't manage lockdown well are unlikely to be considered ready to handle the Wallabies.
