All 13 Belenenses players tested positive for the South African strain
The return of club football after the last national team break left a match for the black memory of the Portuguese league. Benfica thrashed Belenenses 0 to 7 in a clash that should never have been disputed after the 13 positives by Covid detected in the local team. One of those infected, Thibang Phete, had traveled to play matches with South Africa, the country where the new Omicron variant originated. The National Institute of Health “Ricardo Jorge” (INSA) of Portugal has confirmed today that these cases are caused by the new strain.
The match had to be suspended at the start of the second half, when Benfica won 0-7 against a rival who had no means to compete. The modest team from the Belem neighborhood in Lisbon was immersed in a cartoonish situation: deprived of thirteen players by an outbreak of covid-19, as well as their coach and various components of the technical team, Belenenses had to draw an initial team made up of several players from the reserve team, a goalkeeper in the forward position … and even so he only gave them to add nine footballers, without spare parts on the bench.
At halftime, the unusual gave way to the absurd and ridiculous: with 0-7 on the scoreboard and only seven players available -two were declared injured-, Belenenses returned to the field to play the second half, which never started. Because before, one of the local footballers fell to the ground, supposedly injured and unable to continue, forcing the referee to call the game over, since the regulation establishes that a match cannot continue if one of the teams remains with less than seven troops.
After the game, the president of Belenenses, Rui Pedro Soares, assured that he had asked the Portuguese League to postpone the game: “They told us that with eight players” the game had to be played, under the threat of sanctions, he said in a roundtable. press.
A League official, quoted by the local press, admitted a telephone contact with the president of Belenenses, but specified that he had not received a “formal request” to postpone the match, and that the organizer of the championship had no elements to analyze the situation. “It is a black page in Portuguese football, but Benfica is not responsible at all,” declared the president of the Lisbon club, Rui Costa, visibly upset.
The decision to keep the game was unanimously criticized by the big clubs. Sporting assured that this episode would harm “the credibility of the Portuguese championship”, which “will have a hard time being taken seriously”, while Porto’s communication director regretted that Portugal’s image of a “third world country”.
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