THE Football Association and the Rugby Football Union have come to rather different decisions on how end their respective 2019/20 seasons.

Both national governing bodies, as well as those of other sports, have been forced into deciding how to bring the season to a conclusion following the impromptu suspension of all sporting events last month amid the coronavirus pandemic.

With sport not likely to resume any time soon, the first question was whether to keep the season alive in order to try and finish it at a later date, whenever that should be, or to bring it all to an end and then sort out the ramifications in due course.

Both bodies opted for the latter but had very different ideas on what to do with the campaign.

While the RFU chose to use a best playing record method to determine final placings and ensure that its teams’ hard work over the season had not been for nothing, the FA opted to null and void the season and pretend that none of it had ever happened.

READ MORE: South West Peninsula League season declared null and void

It means that while the likes of Wellington, St Austell and Truro are celebrating the end of a fine rugby season with the promotions and league titles they deserve, the efforts of Truro City, Helston Athletic and Penryn Athletic, who were all just a few weeks away from winning their respective football leagues and earning promotion, will be wiped from history.

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has made it difficult for any fully satisfying outcome to emerge, but surely there were better ways to deal with it than the FA’s drastic approach to null and void the season?

There were better ways, and the RFU chose probably the best one available.

It is certainly not preferable to finishing the season, but with that looking increasingly unlikely – and then impossible when the RFU announced on March 20 that it had ended the season – the next best option was surely to draw a satisfactory line under the season somehow.

READ MORE: Redruth miss out on promotion but Truro crowned champions as RFU reveal final tables

Using the league tables as they stood, while still preferable to just canning the season, would have been unfair on those clubs with games in hand, but the RFU's method of using a points-per-game system solves that problem rather nicely. Yes, there still exists the problem of clubs not having played every opponent the same number of times, but this outcome was just about as good as it got.

But rather than make that fairly sensible move, the FA decided to pour petrol all over the 2019/20 campaign and light a match, with the football community left to watch as eight months of hard work went up in flames.

The RFU’s decision is not without its downsides. Redruth were enjoying a 13-match winning run and were intent on crashing the promotion party of Taunton Titans and Tonbridge Juddians but were still two points shy of the latter in the second promotion place at the time of the suspension.

The Reds were in better form than Tonbridge, but this was not reflected in the method to determine the final placings, meaning Nigel Hambly’s side miss the chance to win promotion that they may well have taken had they had the opportunity to do it on the pitch.

But what if the RFU had followed the FA’s plan and abandoned the season completely? Redruth would still not have gone up, but neither would Taunton or Tonbridge, nor Truro, who got the promotion and title they deserved after dominating the Cornwall/Devon League.

READ MORE: “Completely illogical and silly” – Wendron boss slams FA decision to end season

Yes, there would have been winners and losers whatever decision they made, but surely there had to be something to acknowledge the hard work that clubs had done over the last nine months?

The difference in the two sports’ stances means we will have the ludicrous situation of whenever someone looks back at the history of the season they will see that both of Truro’s premier sports teams were leading their respective divisions, but only one team actually won their league, while the other were forced to pretend it never happened.

While sporting integrity is naturally the biggest talking point around the decision, there are plenty of other knock-on effects. Not least financially, with football clubs set to miss out on several home games worth of matchday income now that all fixtures have been expunged.

Rugby clubs will still miss out, but with most leagues only a handful of games away from reaching the end of the season it meant that clubs had played the bulk of their home games and taken the various sources of income from those.

But with the football season yet again beset by postponements over the winter, it meant that many clubs were yet to host several fixtures. Falmouth Town had nine home games still to play, Porthleven had eight, and even Helston Athletic on the lower end of the scale still had six. All those vital sources of income will now be lost.

READ MORE: "The important thing is we’ve got certainty now" - Eagles boss on RFU decision

Prize money is another issue. While rugby teams still stand to receive prize money in the usual way, football teams will lose this cash boost at a time when they could really need it. While it would be foolish to rely on this as a source of income, it is just reward for those clubs that would otherwise have earned it and have invested time and money into building a team that was destined to win a title.

While the South West Peninsula League generously used its prize money kitty as part of an aid package for its member clubs, this will not necessarily be replicated across the whole country.

From the supporters’ perspective, rugby fans will get to look back at the games they have watched and invested in, both financially and emotionally, this season and know that while it may not have ended the way they would have wanted it to, all that had gone before still mattered.

Football fans, on the other hand, now know that they have essentially watched a bunch of glorified friendly matches. All the money spent on entry fees and in clubhouses, all those miles on the road for away trips, for nothing.

Dealing with the current situation was always going to be a sensitive issue, with any debate over the topic being shouted down by people saying that there are important things going on.

They are correct, but we still needed a decision to be made, and it would seem that rugby got it right and football got it wrong.

READ MORE: "It all seems to have just been a complete waste" - Penryn boss bemoans FA decision