As part of the Victorian Government response to the latest COVID-19 outbreak Victoria will go into a seven-day statewide lockdown.
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People will be allowed to leave their house for a total of five reasons, with private and public gatherings not permitted, meaning the fate of community sports seasons has been thrown up in the air.
No games will take place on Saturday May 29, with leagues around the Wimmera now scrabbling to put their contingency plans into place.
As announced this morning by the Victorian State Government, community sport will not be permitted from 11:59pm, Thursday May 272021 until 11:59pm, Thursday 3 June 2021.
This means no training and no matches are to occur in this timeframe. Social gatherings are also not permitted which means no club functions.
An AFL Western District spokesperson said under these restrictions, any scheduled training or club functions are able to take place as long as they are concluded by 11:59pm tonight (Thursday, 27 May 2021).
"Leagues and AFL Western District discussed and enacted plans for COVID-19 impacted rounds prior to season 2021 so we are prepared for this situation. It is now appropriate to revisit these. Individual leagues will have discretion within their own by-laws with how they treat any impacted round(s) as a result of these current restrictions," they said.
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In the Mininera and District Football League and Mininera and District Netball Association, league officials will be meeting to discuss what the remainder of the 2021 season might look like.
MDFL president said he had been on the phone to other board members and will start communicating clubs in the league soon.
"I've been on the phone ringing around and there will obviously be no sport on the weekend," he said.
"We will postpone this round and we are hoping it will be moved to the Queen's Birthday weekend, at this stage that is probably what we are going to do.
"We have got a contingency plan, but we are going to have to get together this coming week and sit down and do it properly."
Horsham and District Football Netball League president Fred Mellington said he and the board will be meeting on Friday night to dicuss what the remainder of their season will look like.
"We already accounted for situations like this in our draw, so we have options we can use," he said.
"We were smart enough to have three full-league byes across the season which gives us us a couple of weeks spare that we can use.
"Right now there are a million questions and I don't have the answers."
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Mr Mellington said all options were on the table for the rest of season, but there is clearly a lot of unknowns ahead.
"Do you know how long this will last, I don't," he said.
"We will just have wait and see.
"All we can do is assess our draw that we have in place.
"We will work on the best case scenario moving forward, that allows us to play when we are allowed to play.
"This round might be lost at the expense of something else and it might replace something at the expense of something else."
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