Wagga Tigers coach Troy Maiden believes the 2020 season must be a minimum of one full round

Maiden led Tigers to premiership glory in his first season back in charge last year and had already got a couple of pre-season trial games in before the season was postponed last month due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Riverina League season has been postponed until May 31, at least, and Maiden remains hopeful that the season will go ahead in some format later in the year.

"I'm definitely hopeful. I'm probably a little bit more optimistic now than what I was a few weeks ago," Maiden said.

"A few weeks ago I thought it was going to be really difficult to play any footy this year with what's going on. There's a lot more important things in the world going on at the moment in regards to people's health and we want people to be safe and healthy.

"Obviously getting footy back and going and getting everyone together would be one of the bonuses if it got to that point, that it got under control and it went away."

Maiden believes any version of the 2020 season needs to be at least one full round of games.

"Absolutely. I think to make a season worthwhile we've got to at least get one round where we play everybody to make it fair," he said.

"And from there, I don't know, I think for me a top five would stay as is. Is this a time to be experimenting? I'm not too sure, but it's each to their own in regards to things like that."

Maiden is open to a late finish to the season, should it be needed.

"I would think the end of October, if we needed, go a week or two in November," he said.

"Is that workable with cricket? Who knows. But from a footy perspective we think we could certainly go that deep if we needed to facilitate the half season plus finals. I'd say definitely the end of October."

Maiden had Tigers ready to go for their round one Good Friday clash against Turvey Park, that would have opened the Riverina League season last week.

He said the season postponement, and the uncertainty surrounding the year, is hard for everyone.

"We were lucky. We got two trials game in before it shut down so from that perspective we were lucky," he said.

"It's hard on the players. We played those games early, we had another one lined up for the following weekend and then we were going to have a couple of weekends off and be ready to go for round one, which was obviously last Friday. From that point of view it's been really different.

"I know a lot of the players are away doing their own training and they're pretty self motivated in that regard, which is great, but it is difficult when you haven't got all day to sit there and make phone calls, or send messages. We do have a Facebook page where we could put things out but it's been different I suppose, as everybody knows."

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