European Club Competitions 2021
The Competitions Subcommittee (CSC) and the EK Board would like to thank the relevant clubs for their patience while we have worked hard to review the situation regarding the European Club Competitions 2021.
Following the receipt of feedback from the national organisations and relevant clubs, the IKF has announced that there will be no Europa Cup or Europa Shield events in 2021. Instead, for 2021 they are trialling a new event called the IKF European Tour. There will be two rounds – a qualification round in January and a final round in February. The IKF has invited the EKA to enter two teams into the qualification round. The final round will consist of one pool of 8 teams, 2 of which will be the winners of each qualification pool.
However, this event remains dependent on finding tournament hosts for the qualifying rounds and may yet be affected by the development of the Covid-19 situation across Europe. The final round will be held in the Netherlands.
The EKA is able to nominate two English teams. The EKL Premier Division was frozen on 13th March 2020 and no further matches were to take place. All teams had not played an equal number of games and the top 3 teams had not played each other twice and had not all played each other at least once. The preference would have been for play-offs to take place between the top three teams in order to confirm the qualifying teams for the European Tour, but a play-off scenario is not possible under the current Government restrictions before the cut-off date for nominations.
The CSC and Board have therefore agreed that nominations would be based on a ranking of points per game played, in line with several other sports. Using this method of calculation, Bec has a points per game score of 2.00, Tornadoes 1.7857 and Trojans 1.7692. Therefore, Bec and Tornadoes are being nominated and Trojans will be reserves.
This has been an incredibly difficult decision to make given the close competition for the top spots this season, especially because we face a situation where we cannot foresee that playoffs can be scheduled.
EKL Next Season
The CSC and EK Board are continuing to actively monitor the Government plans to ease restrictions and are putting together the Korfball Return to Play plan which has to be agreed by the Department for Culture and Media and Public Health England. The 2020/21 season can only commence when it is safe to do so and clubs have had sufficient time to train under normal conditions. The format of the competition will be announced when the situation is clearer, given the current work being undertaken by the CSC and EK Board. We would expect to provide further information by mid-September.
During this time, the health and wellbeing of our community is of the utmost importance. Please continue to follow the official guidance and look after yourself and each other.