YARNBURY chairman, Phil Addy, believes his club are in a better position than most to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

At the start of the month, the Horsforth side were forced into furloughing its three employees to access the 80% of salaries provided by the government.

This coincided with the Rugby Football Union finalising the league positions of their community clubs using a formula based around home and away records.

Yarnbury, who were only five points above the drop in Yorkshire Two, managed to survive by 13 points in the end, finishing 11th on 54.36.

Addy thinks the club are going to be able to cope financially during these times of uncertainty but does fear for other teams.

He said: "We will be fine we are in a good position as far as rugby clubs are concerned.

"I think there will be a lot of clubs that fold because they will struggle financially due to there not being a lot of money in grassroots rugby.

"We will defiantly survive and come out fighting the other side. We are a solid club, I have no concerns.

"We have managed to lockdown in regards of cutting our loses and whatever we can do financially we have done.

"We don’t have many direct employees because nearly everything that is done at the club is done on a voluntary basis. We have a great committee.

"We have a bar manager who is paid, a cleaner we have had for years and because we have the APG (artificial pitch) we have someone who looks after that. Unfortunately we had to furlough those guys which does help us because you can’t afford to pay wages when no revenue is coming in.

"We do a big beer festival in the summer and it is a huge fundraiser for us. We have postponed it and we are looking to change that to September. Will things be ok by then? If not that is a big dent in what we do so we would have to recess."

Despite a poor campaign, the Yarnbury chief was always confident that his team would have produced the goods at the business end of the season if it had played to a finish.

He added: "We were relieved. It was just a strange season. We were getting beat by the odd points in high scoring games all through the season. We had a lot of injuries, I don’t think we put the full first team out once.

"You could see it turning around in the last few weeks. We lost three games in the last two minutes, the games were ridiculously close.

"We were playing good rugby, things just didn’t seem to be going our way for a while and then you could see it change in the last few games. We were pretty confident that we would have stayed up."

Asked whether he thinks next season will start on time, Addy is trying to stay positive.

He said: "Most people I speak to can’t see it starting on time. I am quite optimistic though.

"I don’t think it will start in August but I think we should be able to get some sort of rugby underway by October. "