THE Gawler Eagles will be back in action on July 4 as the South Australian State League Two announced its return-to-play plan.

Senior coach Mike Cawood commended the league for staying pro-active during the hiatus, and said his players, who have been back at training for three weeks now, are raring to go.

“The federation has set the guidelines, and they’re pretty reasonable to me,” he said.

“You can have your certain number per group, the players must be signed in on arrival, there’s plenty of hand sanitiser… I’m quite paranoid about all this type of stuff, but when you follow the guidelines, I can’t see any problems.

“We’re allowed to have contact training now, but when there’s a break in training or the coaches are talking, we’re still socially distancing from each other.”

After missing eight games – rounds five-through-12 – Cawood said that league still isn’t completely sure if it will play mid-week games to catch-up, or extend the season into summer, but the feeling is that it will be a complete season.

“They’re looking at a couple options where we may just play 22 rounds with no final series, or we can play mid-week, but we can’t go for too long because then we’re going to run into summer sports,” he said.

“For us particularly, we’ve got a ground-share which could be an issue with baseball and softball teams also using our ground.

“So they’ve given us our start date of July 4, but they haven’t told us yet all the finer details.”

Cawood said, with his boys, it appears that absence made the heart grow fonder.

“These guys just want to play football,” he said.

“They just can’t wait to get on with it.”

The Eagles will resume its season making the long drive to Port Noarlunga to take on Noarlunga United on July 4, the day after the competition officially gets back underway on July 3.