Barbarians are set to be resigned to sudden death football throughout the entire New Era Cup finals series after being docked 10 competition points, with the opening week of the post-season looming the loss relegates the Orange outfit to the bottom half of the table.
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Country Rugby League officials confirmed an audit of match sheets revealed Barbarians had fielded one or more players who weren't correctly registered in five of their 2019 victories. Two of those players' clearances were not completed correctly, while another had not been registered.
The points Barbarians earned from those triumphs have already been stripped while at least one other victory, their 22-16 win over CSU Bathurst in round one, is yet to be audited, the possibility of those points being docked remains if a breach occurred in that game as well.
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The New Era Cup's finals begin this weekend and the auditing process is expected to be complete by Wednesday, after which it will be confirmed whether the Barbarians finish third or fourth. They were second prior to the points being docked.
Either way they will play the Lithgow Bears in this weekend's third-versus-fourth minor semi-final as a result, being a four-team competition it's not possible for the Orange side to miss the finals completely.
CRL officials indicated Barbarians had been informed of their right to contact the Group 10 Rugby League executive should they wish to appeal, however at time of publication it remained unconfirmed as to whether the Orange club had done so.
The Central Western Daily wasn't able to contact Barbarians president Paul Rudd for comment however the club's co-captain-coach Mitch Britt said the situation was "obviously not ideal", but admitted he wasn't certain as to whether the club would appeal the decision or not.
From the playing group's perspective he said losing the competition points was frustrating but, looking for a silver lining, he added he hopes it galvanises the group.
"Hopefully it lights a fire in the playing group's bellies to kick-start a run through the finals," he said.
"We have the benefit of being in a four-team competition so we know we're playing finals anyway, and we're a side that builds on momentum so we can probably take advantage of having to play every week.
"It's definitely disappointing and it is pretty frustrating for the playing group because they'd done all that hard work to get into the top two, but there's not much we can do other than move on from it now."
CSU will host the first weekend of the finals at Diggings Oval this weekend and, pending any Barbarians' appeal, they'll take on Portland in the major semi-final.
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Matt Findlay
Formerly a sports specialist, I'm based at Orange and shift between wide-spread range of subjects here and, often, across the entire Central West region of NSW as well. I have almost a decade of experience in the media and marketing industries both here in Australia and internationally, along with journalism I have experience in content strategy, brand development, and digital and social media. Along the way, I've been fortunate to win a handful of media awards and be nominated for several others too.
Formerly a sports specialist, I'm based at Orange and shift between wide-spread range of subjects here and, often, across the entire Central West region of NSW as well. I have almost a decade of experience in the media and marketing industries both here in Australia and internationally, along with journalism I have experience in content strategy, brand development, and digital and social media. Along the way, I've been fortunate to win a handful of media awards and be nominated for several others too.
