Like other sports, football is now banned in the Old Country. Patron of the Valais Cantonal Association, Aristide Bagnoud says he is relieved of enormous pressure.
The Valais fields, like that of Christ-Roi in Lens, will no longer welcome players in 2020.
Keystone
Por all amateur Valais footballers, the 2020-2021 season is at a standstill and no one is able to say whether it will be able to resume in the spring. The decision of the Board ofIT’Stat valaisan to ban all contact sports, including football, automatically frozen rankings and suspended all competitions (i.e. around 300 matches per weekend, including junior).
“We could no longer continue to have fun while our hospitals are saturated”
For Aristide Bagnoud, President of the Association Valais of football since 2013, there was no other alternative. “AT at some point, he said, we couldn’t continue to have fun and play on weekends when cases explode and that our hospitals are saturated. For this year, it’s over. There are things more important than a game.»
Aristide Bagnoud, boss of Valais football since 2013.
DR
“The clubs were starting to run out of players, parents were already no longer sending their children”
The boss of the AVF even says he is freed from a weights. «Everyone feels relieved but we didn’t have the power to say stop. For us, it is a relief even if a feeling of sadness mingles with it. This decision saves us a lot of problems and questions to which we had no answers. Clubs were starting to run out of players, parents were already no longer sending their children for fear of the virus. A dozen clubs had written to us to stop everything.»
TFalling this Wednesday at the beginning of the afternoon, the decision was already brewing last night. «We expected something along these lines.» With championships now suspended until further notice, what will happen in 2021? «Nothing says that we can start over as we hope. The new ASF regulations specify that for a promotion or a relegation to be confirmed, half of the matches must be played. Frankly, I do not know if we will succeed …»
The decision concerns everyone amateur, so also the Valais clubs of 2nd interregional league: Sierre, Conthey, Monthey and FC Saint-Maurice. It also affects FC Martigny-Sport and Naters in the 1st league.
