Mar 31st, 2020

Mar 31st, 2020

The entire NRL population could be relocated to a tropical island and brought back to the mainland for games, a rugby league great has suggested.

In a plan that has been forwarded to NRL bosses, Chris Johns says that players, team staff, match officials and media could all be housed at Tangalooma Island Resort, on Queensland's Moreton Island.

They could then be ferried back to the mainland to play games at Brisbane's Suncorp Stadium, Redcliffe Stadium and Gold Coast's Cbus Super Stadium. It would be an enormous operation; the NRL's combined rosters amount to 480 players.

It is a variation of an earlier plan to house NRL players at a vacant FIFO mining facility at Calliope, near Gladstone in Central Queensland; with the added benefits of increased isolation and the proximity of three NRL-standard stadiums.

"What better place to put the players, in a totally isolated area?" Johns told Nine News. "It's an island - no one gets on, no one gets off."

The Tangalooma area of Moreton Island. (Nine)

ARLC chairman Peter V'landys is pushing to resume the NRL by July to stave off financial disaster, with September 1 the final deadline. Severe health restrictions will likely be in place in the event that games can somehow restart. The Calliope idea was unable to come to fruition before the NRL was shut down last week.

One concern surrounding the Calliope plan was that a single person with COVID-19 - a chef, masseuse, or another outside party - could expose the entire NRL population to coronavirus while all the players were all in one place. That fear may be lessened with the island setting.

Johns, a former Brisbane Broncos star who played for NSW and Australia before becoming a club official, elaborated on the Tangalooma plan to Triple M.

"The Gladstone thing, when you look at it, it was a great idea by [ARLC chairman] Peter V'landys," Johns said.

"But when you look at this proposal, I think the infrastructure - there's a lot more infrastructure in place, you've got three wonderful stadiums. You've got a situation where you've got an island, so you've got total isolation.

"You've got a transport system where you've got fliers that can ferry the players and officials and everyone that has to be from the island to the mainland in 30-40 minutes, straight into a bus, a totally isolated bus.

"The bus goes to the stadium, no one's in the stadium. The game gets played and then, bang, back on to a bus, back on to that transport and back on to an island which is totally isolated.

Chris Johns (second left) with Brian Niebling, Gene Miles and Wally Lewis at a Broncos game in 2013. (Getty)

"The beautiful thing is, there's 1,500 beds there; and that's before you start going to Jayco or other caravan people, bringing in winnebagos and setting up a lot more infrastructure.

"But at the start, there's 1,500 rooms and on top of that, you've got a [grass] airstrip that's 900m long, so you can put four or five football fields on it. There's going to be ample room for training facilities and ample room for sleeping people.

"There's infrastructure in place for kitchens and supplying food. When you look at it, it's an absolute ideal situation."

Tangalooma Airfield could be converted to NRL training field, Chris Johns says. (Google)

Tangalooma Island Resort is best known for picturesque shipwrecks, dolphin feeding and whale watching. It is a sub-tropical holiday haven - not a bad place for NRL players to be stuck.l

Johns said that if the scheme was launched properly, it would be less hazardous than going to a supermarket to get supplies and would offer both the game and the national economy a boost.

He said that once the NRL was comfortable that the plan could work without risk of infection to players, Tangalooma would be ready to house players almost immediately.

The New Zealand Warriors have said that they are prepared to again be based in Australia in the event that the NRL can somehow resume amid coronavirus restrictions.