Paris (AFP)
The worrying rebound of the Covid-19 pandemic in France wins professional football: after a Ligue 2 match on Friday, the Ligue 1 Lens-Nantes poster was postponed on Saturday after the discovery of 11 positive cases in the workforce lensois on the eve of the meeting.
If professional football is relatively spared by the curfew measures entered into force this Saturday in 54 departments which do not prevent the matches from being held in the evening behind closed doors, the round ball can do nothing in the face of the avalanche contaminations, which have just passed the symbolic milestone of one million in France.
Saturday evening, the Professional Football League (LFP) had to face the alarming situation affecting the Lens club.
Eleven players have indeed tested positive for Covid-19 before receiving Nantes on Sunday at the beginning of the afternoon: it is one too many to maintain the meeting, according to the protocol in force since the beginning of September.
Acted by the League in relation to the public authorities, this indeed opens the way to a postponement when less than 20 players on a list of 30 per team are tested negative ... which was the case for the Sang team. and Gold with 11 positive cases.
- Cluster in Grenoble -
The decision was recorded "after the opinion of the National Covid Commission" of the French Football Federation (FFF), said the League in a statement very similar to that published the day before for the match of Ligue 2 (2nd division) Grenoble- Nancy.
Indeed, the Grenoble workforce had 13 positive cases of Covid-19 (as well as 5 members of the management also contaminated), which had already forced the authorities of French football to pronounce a postponement sine die of this meeting initially planned. this Saturday at 7:00 p.m.
These two matches, which will be rescheduled later, are the first professional football championship matches to experience such fate since the entry into force of this protocol.
The old document, which was valid until September 4, was much stricter because it involved a postponement of the match from four cases over eight rolling days in the professional group of a team.
What condemned the opening match of the Championship season, Marseille - Saint-Étienne, initially scheduled for August 21 and postponed.
Both Lens and Grenoble are located in departments (Pas-de-Calais and Isère) affected by the curfew measures put in place by the government and which since this Saturday have forced some 43 million French people to stay at home between 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. for six weeks.
- Football holds its breath -
The two clubs have taken note of the decision, Nantes also announcing the positive test of one of its players, Andrei Girotto.
"We undergo things. It's damaging because we were there in Lens and we had the final decision only this (Saturday) evening," responded the Nantes coach Christian Gourcuff on the club site.
As for the Lensois club, it refused to give the identity of the players concerned by the positive tests.
According to the daily La Voix du Nord, two members of the staff (including coach Franck Haise) are also concerned.
RC Lens had been rather spared by the Covid-19 until then, when other formations, such as Paris SG or Strasbourg, suffered the pandemic much more brutally.
Thus, the superstars Neymar and Kylian Mbappé were affected between the end of August and the end of September.
If the players were relatively spared from serious cases, apart from the hospitalization of Montpellier Junior Sambia in the spring in particular, the situation has cause for concern for French football.
Already stuck in a standoff with its major broadcaster Mediapro, which wants to review the terms of its TV rights contract, already deprived of ticketing revenues due to the spectator limit gauges put in place, it now risks having to manage several postponements if the situation escalates, in the middle of an already crowded schedule due to a delayed start of the 2020-21 season.
"There is a health condition which is a priority but for the competition, that changes a lot of things", has already pointed out Gourcuff.
"I think that what we lived there, it will happen again".
© 2020 AFP