Antoine Dupont before the Ireland-France match counting for the VI Nations Tournament.

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Brian Lawless / AP / SIPA

  • The match between France and Scotland, scheduled for Sunday on behalf of the 3rd day of the VI Nations Tournament, has been postponed because of the cases of Covid detected within the France group. 

  • The Organizing Committee will have to find a new date to play the match. 

  • A decision far from simple, as the possibilities are few, in any case if we do not want to harm anyone. 

Quite a puzzle.

Moreover, if the date of the postponement of the match between France and Scotland has not yet been communicated, it is good that it is not so easy to find.

The organizing committee of the Sixth Nations Tournament, after having declared Thursday "unanimously" the non-holding of the meeting because of the complicated health situation in which the XV of France got stuck, still working on its options this Friday.

Only one thing is certain, there is no perfect one.

The simplest, on paper, would be to postpone the meeting simply by a week, if we do not see a new cluster in the France group by then.

The Tournament will take a break, before the 4th day, on March 13 and 14.

But Scotland reiterated on Thursday, diplomatically but firmly, that it did not agree.

At all.

"We want to have all of our eligible players at our disposal for the meeting, so that we can play at the same level we would have had this weekend," said manager Greg Townsend in a statement.

The example of France-Ireland in 2012

The next weekend is indeed a day of the English championship, in which nine Scottish players must participate, as stipulated in an agreement between the clubs and the Federation before the start of the Tournament.

Imagine for two seconds how the Scots would take it if they came to be beaten in Paris with their B team against a XV of France who would have recovered almost all his players, while they have nothing to be ashamed of in this story ...

Attention, small precision.

It is not because the choice of this date would go against the elementary principle of sporting fairness that the Six Nations Committee will necessarily rule it out.

Even if it means forcing the Scottish Federation to reconsider its agreement with the clubs.

We remember that in February 2012, after deciding at the last minute to postpone France-Ireland because of frozen terrain, the organizer unilaterally chose the date of March 4 to play this meeting.

And too bad for Toulouse and Clermont, in particular, who had to compete for the shock at the top of the Top 14 without their international car.

No date in April, May, June ...

It is all the same difficult to imagine the Committee to decide so, especially that the next weekend is not part of the international windows decreed by World Rugby.

And after that ?

No date is available in March, hardly more in April-May, reserved by the European Professional Club Rugby for the finals of the European Cup.

June then?

No my good lady, every weekend is taken by the last days and then the finals of the Top 14 and the Premiership.

So we arrive in July.

For the moment, the Blues are supposed to go on tour in Australia, where three meetings are planned on the 3, 10 and 17. Will it be maintained because of the pandemic?

“I had a meeting with the new president of the Australian Rugby Federation, Hamish McLennan.

He told me that we will be well received, that there was no problem.

Everything will be done to make this happen, ”said Bernard Laporte last week in an interview with

Rugbyrama

.

But that was before the Marcoussis cluster.

The defeat on the green carpet not provided for in the regulations

There would then remain the possibility of finishing the Tournament in the fall, as was the case for the 2020 edition. A deadline that we imagine too distant for the idea to seduce.

As a last resort, can the Blues lose the meeting on the green carpet?

Unlike the Autumn Nations Cup, where the competition rules stated "that if a team is primarily responsible for a match that did not take place, a 28-0 victory will be awarded to the opponent who could have played. the match ”, nothing in that of the Tournament foresees such a scenario.

The moral of all this: we wish the Organizing Committee good luck in finding a solution that suits everyone.

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  • Coronavirus

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  • XV of France

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