Dean Ryan insists the health and safe return of his Dragons will always be the priority after the Welsh derby season was disrupted – but he hopes there is now light at the end of the tunnel.
Dragons have seen all three Welsh derby fixtures postponed in recent times – with Saturday’s United Rugby Championship (URC) game with Scarlets the latest to now be played later in the season.
The Director of Dragons Rugby is hopeful his squad is now coming out of a two-week cycle that has hit numerous sides and can return to action in the European clash with Benetton next weekend.
However, he admits the safe and graded return of his Covid-hit players has got to remain the focus after multiple cases at the region.
“When you look across all teams, this has been a two-week episode,” he said. “The first week that we lost a derby, we were ready to go. We lost the game against the Ospreys through no issue in our camp.
“We lost the second game as both ourselves and Cardiff had really high numbers and now, in our second week, there are a variety of returning players but also more cases.
“We’ve struggled in some positions; struggled on health reasons and struggled on numbers - that's the reality of the second week of an outbreak.
“We've always tried to run a graded return for our players. We're very aware primarily of the health of our players.
“We've had a number that have felt pretty sick so we have to manage their graded return in a different way - we've got a prioritise that.
“We can't rush that period because we're going to be faced with more problems with players not being able to play.
“The front row is the one area where we have the least amount of flexibility and that's been a significant challenge for us,” he added.
“We put a scrum down against the machine today (Thursday) for the first time in in over two weeks and the numbers that we've got to be able to do that are pretty restricted.
“Front row is a place you can't make compromises. We have a number of front rowers who have been part of this situation. “But it’s not just about positional situations, it's about health situations, it's about numbers.
“At the beginning of the week we had, out of the whole squad, only 27 capable of taking the training pitch, so you can see just how we've been down.”
Dragons are next due to be in action in Treviso next Saturday (January 15) and Ryan remains optimistic about that returning date.
“We would hope, as we move into next week, that we start to accumulate more numbers in good health and then we can start to move forward to Benetton,” he said.
“We are hopeful, but we have to remember we are only one part of that equation. Everything has got to be subject to us getting more cases, but as we've observed with other teams, two weeks seems to be the cycle before you start to come through.
“It's been tough preparing and then finding out each time, halfway through a week, that we've got to jump into the next week and see what the numbers are then.
“I think we're coming to the end of that two-week period and we've a number of guys coming back in for the first time later this week.
“We'd hope to start to recover some numbers, subject to us not getting any more. “If we can continue to be low on the that we get, we should start to see people across the weekend returning.”
