A lead-in to finals essential for Ovens and Murray as COVID-19 wreaks havoc on season

A board meeting was held on Tuesday in the wake of a one-week extension to the lockdown in Victoria after several scenarios were put to clubs earlier in the day, but the fast-moving nature of the COVID-19 crisis in NSW and Victoria makes it incredibly hard to plan around.

League general manager Craig Millar conceded the delay to the competition could be "three or four weeks" with NSW red zone permits paused and likely crowd caps to be in place when Victoria eventually comes out of lockdown.

"We've got a number of options available that we've been working on since we got wind we'd be going into another lockdown, but it depends on what remaining components of the home and away fixture we can still complete," Millar said.

"There's a need to have some sort of a lead-up to a finals series in the event we lose the majority of the home and away season.

"We have options to extend if we need to, but we said we'd make more decisions around that over the next 10 days just to get us through the next announcement of restrictions, or hopefully in our instance, easing of them.

"It is difficult at the moment to go public with what that looks like because it's moving so quickly."

Finals is a different beast with the likelihood of having multiple clubs at the same venue.

As it stands, eight of the 10 clubs, with the exception of Wodonga and North Albury, have teams in the top five.

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Millar said the league is committed to a September 19 finish, with the newly-developed Lavington Sports Ground booked to host the Albury-Wodonga Football Association cup final on September 26.

"We've got to give consideration to what crowd numbers look like in finals. There's a lot of things up in the air at the moment," Millar added.

"We always look at A grade netball and senior football, but our community competition has seven grades.

"When you go into netball there's a fair sprinkling of NSW teams that are set to be playing in finals, so we've got a lot of considerations to take on board when our decision-making process takes place.

"I think we're all praying we can leave this Border Bubble open when Victoria comes out of lockdown and whether Melbourne stays in it longer than we do will allow us to consider some other options.

"That's the unique nature of a border competition, they work for you sometimes and sometimes against you."

Round 14, scheduled to be played this weekend, has been cancelled.

"It it gets well beyond this round, we'll review what gets postponed or cancelled. That's the deliberation we need to do as a league and a board next week when we get a better understanding of what's happening with this lockdown," Millar said.

"We want to make sure there's as much equity in the balance as possible."

The O and M board will meet again next Tuesday to reassess the situation.

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