'Super Round’ makes rugby more competitive – Illyas

By Harsha Amarasinghe

The latest addition to the Sri Lanka club rugby season, the ‘SuperRound’ would make the league competition more competitive, according to the Tournament Director and Sri Lanka Rugby (SLR) Vice President Rizly Illyas.

“Through the introduction of Super Round we have been able to make this tournament even more competitive because now we have got three teams with a realistic chance of winning the league. It could have been all over last week had we stuck to our old methods. What this does is it adds a new dimension to our rugby,” Illyas told Daily Mirror.

SLR were also able to bring in foreign referees for the last couple of weeks of the second round which appears to have done a world of good for the tournament. 

“We recognized the importance of getting foreign referees down. This doesn’t mean that our referees are bad or anything like that, but I felt they lacked confident and consistency and now they too have a great opportunity to look at the foreign referees and improve their standards. We haven’t had any complaints from fans as the foreign referees did exceptionally well,” added Illyas. 

The stage is now set for the final two weeks in the Dialog Rugby League 2018/19, with the ‘Super Round’ set to take off on the 23nd of February. 

The ‘Super Round’, a new addition to the Dialog rugby season was introduced by Sri Lanka Rugby (SLR) this year, to give teams more options and chances of coming on top, and also making the League more competitive and interesting.

In the past the Dialog Rugby League was a two-round league tournament, with each club playing each other home and away and the team with the most amount of league points taking away the Dialog Rugby League trophy.

But this time the ‘Super Round’ brings in a different dimension to the league.

Based on the currents standings of the league, the teams are divided to Cup and Plate.

The top 4 goes into the Cup championship, and the bottom 4 into the Plate championship.

The top two teams in the Dialog Rugby League points table at the end of the first two rounds will have the choice of picking the venue.

Match points earned in Dialog Rugby League 2018/2019 - first Round, second Round and Dialog Rugby League Cup Championship Super Round, will be added together and the team which gets the highest number of match points will be declared as the winner of the Dialog Rugby League Cup Championship 2018/2019.

Havelock Sports Club is leading the points table, while defending champions Kandy are in second place.

They are followed by CH & FC in third place, and CR & FC in fouth Place. These four teams will play in the Cup Championship.

The four teams from the forces, Army Sports Club, Navy Sports club, Police Sports Club and Air Force Sports Club will battle it out in the Plate Championship.