Talk about Christmas cheer.
The United Rugby Championship communications department was busy last week but not with season's greetings.
The emails came thick and fast, each one met with a sigh as more games fell by the wayside.
They should, of course, have contained team news and previews but it was a case of medical advice determining that the games should not proceed.
We lost the Munster-Leinster clash first, then Ulster's home game with Connacht was scrapped.
Later the Welsh derby between Cardiff and Scarlets was called off.
These cancellations came on the back of Leinster's ill-fated Champions Cup second round clash with Montpellier being called off late in the day.
The province were fully confident they could send a travelling party to France to fulfill the fixture but EPCR thought otherwise.
And last Tuesday the news came through that more cases in the squad scuppered the St Stephen’s Day derby, originally to be played in a sold-out Thomond Park.
"A number of positive Covid-19 cases within the Leinster squad have been reported by the province," said the URC.
"The URC Medical Advisory Group has liaised with the IRFU and Leinster, who are working with the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) and deemed that the fixture cannot go ahead as scheduled.
"The United Rugby Championship will now consider available dates to reschedule the game."
They added that the New Year’s Day clash against Ulster is not affected, however, the Belfast-based side had to cancel their game yesterday when they found a number of cases within the camp.
The worry is now that more games will be called off.
The URC was set up this year so that no games were scheduled during the Six Nations window and that allows for some leeway in rearranging the postponed games.
However, the South Africa issue still exists with teams reluctant to travel to the country after seeing what happened to Munster, Scarlets, Cardiff and Zebre.
What guarantees are in place to ensure that they could get home safely in the event that they suffered another breakout on their travels.
"We’ll take a bit of convincing, to be quite honest," said Cardiff boss Dai Young.
"The onus is on the URC, really, to convince us that it’s the right thing to do.
"I know they’ve come out and made a statement that we’re [potentially] going back there, but first and foremost we’d need guarantees that if something did happen, we’d get out of there.
"It was very difficult for us to get out of the country. Once is probably bad luck, twice is a bit stupid really, isn’t it."
There is a possibility that Italy could 'host’ the South African teams’ home games but that would really detract from the whole point of having the Rainbow Nation involved in the first place.
In fact when the original announcement that South Africa had been cleared to host games, the URC said it was "thrilled" and CEO Martin Anayi said it was a "brilliant result" for the league.
Needs must but it will still be a poor consolation if they are playing ‘home’ games in Italy.
Already there have been confirmed amendments, with Leinster’s home clash with Lions, and Connacht’s home match against Stormers - both due to take place on the second weekend in January - moved to the end of February.
Munster’s games that were cancelled in South Africa, against the Bulls and Lions, are due to take place on the same weekends as the last two rounds of the Six Nations in the middle of March.
Ulster are scheduled to fly south with games against Stormers and Bulls on 26 March and 2 April, while Connacht and Leinster are not due to make that trip until the end of April.
There is just no way to know how those games will fare this far out.
For the week ahead, rugby fans will be keeping their fingers crossed that the games between Connacht and Munster, and Ulster and Leinster, both on New Year’s Day, get the go-ahead.
Ulster normally hold their weekly press conferences on Mondays so barring another unwanted email from URC that will be the first glimpse we get of this week’s prospects.
God knows, we could do with some Christmas cheer.
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