sport, national-sport-news

Super Netball will consider bringing teams together to play off in a World Cup style format as a last resort to complete the 2020 season after its coronavirus postponement. The eight-team national competition has been delayed until at least the end of June and chief executive Chris Symington says a range of scenarios are being explored dependent on when they can begin play. "We are still working to get an understanding of what's possible from a logistical point of view and also what's achievable for our teams and our broadcaster," Symington told AAP. The competition was set to commence on May 2 and run over 14 rounds (or 18 weeks) including a split round and three weeks of finals. Symington said there was no "drop-dead" date for the competition to begin and felt netball had an advantage over competitions such as AFL and NRL because the lack of physical contact meant multiple games could be played within a shorter period. "Given the nature of the sport there is the ability to potentially play mid week so you could condense and run a shorter version of the season - so the same amount of matches but over a shorter time frame," Symington said. "That could halve our time frame to eight weeks because you could also look at packaging our three weeks of finals into one weekend or sudden death playoffs so that's also on the table." He said that a Netball World Cup tournament style approach was also a possibility. "That's something we could potentially do and capture as much content as we could in that time-frame without placing too much load on the athletes," Symington said. "They would probably all go to a single location - where that is is anyone's guess at this stage. "But you could take all teams to a single location as you would for a World Cup ... and you play a tournament style with multiple matches within a short period of time. "That's a last resort based on timing toward the end of the year." Symington recognised there could be some broadcasting challenges among a packed sporting schedule toward the end of the year with their free-to-air partner Nine Network also committed to the NRL. "There's no doubt there's potential for a bottleneck to occur at the back half of the year when the shackles hopefully come off," he said. "We need to make sure we're keeping an eye on where we fit in the mix so we can still create some clear air." Australian Associated Press

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