The NRL should never had caved to COVID-19 fears in putting its season on hold, ARLC Chairman Peter V'Landys has said, pointing to the success that racing has had during the shutdown.
V'Landys, who is also CEO of Racing NSW, told News Corp that rugby league could have been crippled, and the national competition reduced to as little at 10 teams as a result of the financial fallout of shutting down.
He said "if he had his time again" he would have ignored government recommendations to shut down the NRL and would have carried on.
"Racing has proven that you can continue on and if I had my time again, quite frankly, we wouldn't have stopped the rugby league," V'landys said.
"I don't think we were any risk playing on. If we had implemented the biosecurity measures we have in place now ... there was really zero risk to the players or the community.
"There was the challenges in relation to the closure of the borders, but I think we could have go around all that. If there is one regret, maybe we acted too quickly."
The chairman also told The Daily Telegraph the NRL was on the brink of being "unrecognisable" due to the coronavirus crisis, with as many as six clubs at one stage teetering on the edge of financial ruin.
"When I used the word catastrophic I was thinking this was bad enough to send five or six clubs broke'" V'landys said.
"And how would we have got them back?
"We could have had a situation where the game was unrecognisable by the time we came out of it.
"What if we'd had to go to a 10-team comp? I was horrified to even think about it."
The NRL is set to resume on May 28, and full fixture details can be found here.
