CORONAVIRUS: Huge travel and safety risks for the core of the Gambia team to face Gabon

Omar Colley and the rest of the Italian contingent will be hoping for smoother travel for the March 23rd game

By Abdoulie Bah

Worrying times ahead for the Gambia and the rest of the footballing world as the health risks posed by outbreak of the coronavirus shows no signs of abating . More so in Italy, where the big news at the weekend wasn’t the football but the whopping six games cancelled. Only four got played.

The league is home to integral members of Tom Saintfiet’s 35-man squad invited yesterday. The scorpions face Gabon in a two-legged 2021 AFCON Qualifier later this month and things aren’t business as usual for the likes of Skipper Omar Colley, Lamin Jallow, Musa Barrow who are all main stays in the Gambian first team. Atalanta’s Ebrima Colley, Yusupha Bobb of Lecco as well Bologna’s Musa Juwara will all be sweating over travel plans for the upcoming game too.

Goalkeeper Shiekh SIBI is playing his trade in Verona, one of the six regions in Italy where sports events have been banned by the government.

With reports in the last 48 hours indicating the virus has reached close door neighbour senegal, fears of a likely spread has increased among many Gambians, raising a potential country vs club row over safety and release of the scorpions plying their trade in Italy . The Gambia Football Federation should also be concerned about the travel of players coming from the affected regions as several countries place restrictions on visitors from the certain areas of Italy.

Monday’s Serie A match between Omar Colley’s Sampdoria and Verona in Genoa is to become the weekend matchday’s sixth match affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

Five weekend games were postponed and the Sampdoria match was one of five cleared to go ahead with spectators by the Italian government. However the president of the Liguria region, Giovanni Toti, said that he did not want to take any unnecessary risks hence a closed-doors order.

Toti said: “Playing Samp-Verona with open doors would be a serious risk, because Genoa has not had any contagion so far, so it would have seemed inappropriate and imprudent to give access to the public.

The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has risen to 34, five more than a day earlier, while the number of confirmed cases was 1,694.