No game before January 27 included. This Monday, the Normandy football league announced a new postponement of all amateur football matches until the end of the month. The fault, explains the institution, to a significant number of covid-19 cases in the teams. At the football club of the Sottevillais cheminot club stadium, which plays in regional 1, you have to find motivation to continue training.
“It’s very long”
“It’s very very long, regrets Gaétan, the goalkeeper of the team. We train but we don’t know when we’re going to play again, it’s boring for us. What matters to us is the matches, so we train while waiting for the matches to come back. We want competition, playing matches all together, 90 minutes and fighting on the pitch. In training, it’s different but we still try to maintain rigor otherwise it will be hard when the competition resumes.”
“Personally I get out of my working day, I’m happy to come and see my friends, says Vincent, central defender and one of the oldest players in the team. It changes your mind because if not in front of the TV all the time, hearing about covid, at some point, it gets drunk. At least here I play, I try to laugh with my friends even if we don’t play a match. At least we see each other and that’s the main thing for now.”
More absenteeism
“We have training three times a week but with the cases of covid, often it is canceled, explains Abibou, the team captain. It complicates things a bit because usually there are at least 22 of us in training and when there are twelve or thirteen, it’s more complicated for the intensity. The players are starting to complain a bit and that’s normal.”
Demotivation is also an observation shared by Raynald Bertin, who coaches the team: “Here, there is no pay, the players come just to train and play at the weekend. When we want to stay warm or have a runny nose, we go say that we’re not coming because we don’t have a match on the weekend. We’re not going to force ourselves to come because if they don’t come to training, no one is going to call them. That generates a little more of absenteeism.”
Absenteeism that the coach understands because at the Sottevillais cheminot club stadium, everyone shares the same opinion: it doesn’t have to last.