Vizela announced, this Wednesday afternoon, that it will attend the game against FC Porto, counting for the quarter-finals of the Portuguese Cup. The Minho emblem, remember, is facing an outbreak of Covid-19 in the main squad.
In the note made available on the official website, the newly promoted team reports the existence of 12 positive cases (nine players) in addition to five injured athletes, one suspended and one at the service of Guinea-Bissau, in the African Cup of Nations. In view of this, FC Porto was asked to postpone, which was refused since the team has the minimum number of players available according to the FPF rules (more than half of the senior players qualified to compete), thus being obliged to resort to athletes under-23 and juniors.
Read the full statement:
“In the regular Covid-19 screening tests that FC Vizela has been doing since the season started, 12 positive cases have been detected in recent days, nine of which are first-team players. Immediately, FC Vizela carried out PCR tests on the entire structure of the club.
Given the size of the numbers and the fact that there are seven more unavailable players (five injured, one suspended and another at the service of the Guinea Bissau National Team), this SAD decided to immediately contact the local Health Authority and ask FC Porto to postponement of the game, a request that was refused yesterday, even while waiting for the laboratory results of the PCR tests. The Portuguese Football Federation was always aware of all these steps.
These results confirmed the confirmation of the positives described above and 11 inconclusive tests, repeated this morning after the scheduled training was cancelled. During the afternoon, the 11 elements (among staff and players) had negative results from Covid-19. Even before these were known, the Local Health Authority informed of the procedures to be adopted, sending all positive and cohabitants to isolation and not decreeing any other isolation measure for the remaining contacts.
With FC Vizela having a sufficient number of players available to comply with the regulations, including players from the main team, under-23 and under-19, tonight’s game will take place, despite the limitations inherent to this whole process and the low accumulated. In the middle of the afternoon, after knowing exactly which players to count on, the team gathered for the possible stage and will appear on the field, naturally, with the same soul and ambition as always».
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