CHENNAI: In the dimly lit corridors of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium here, now shorn of all the billboards that adorn it when Chennaiyin FC play there, two men appear to be engaged in a frantic discussion. Both are officials of Chennai City FC, the I-League outfit, who will begin their AFC Cup campaign on Wednesday. One of them takes a couple of packs of face masks. One is for their players, the other for their Maldivian visitors Maziya S&RC. In the time of the coronavirus, even football needs to hide behind one.
Chennai City’s AFC Cup match is one of the few football matches in Asia that are happening as scheduled. FIFA, on Monday, announced that all AFC World Cup qualifiers over the next four months had been postponed, among them three of India’s fixtures. A number of Asian Champions League and AFC Cup matches have been shifted thanks to the virus as well. The Chennai City-Maziya encounter though received the go-ahead, despite Tamil Nadu registering its first Corona case earlier this week and Indian cases rising to more than 60 on Tuesday.
Talk of the viral outbreak predictably came up at the pre-match press conference on Sunday. Maziya’s Macedonian coach Marjan Sekulovski could only shrug when asked about the risks of travelling to India at a time when any international travel was discouraged. “The biggest problem in the world right now is the coronavirus,” he said. “We try to follow all the official instructions. You have to be careful.”
Chennai City’s coach Akbar Nawas, when asked the same question, pulled out a bottle of hand sanitiser. “This will save all of us,” he laughed. Apparently, he bought the bottle at a mall after landing in the city last night. Once he had his bottle, an instruction was apparently put to all the players in the WhatsApp group that they all share — make sure you have a bottle of hand sanitiser with you at all times. Away from the glare of the press conference though, Nawas delves into a more sensitive topic — the situation back home in Singapore.
The city-state, with 166 confirmed cases, bore the brunt during the early days of the infection. Nawas says his wife has been advised to go to work only on alternate days to minimise risk. He has not been home for more than six months — he knows that once he’s there, he might not be able to come back fast. “In a way, this is good,” he laughs. “Now I can focus only on football, there is no use worrying about anything else.” His laughter, normally infectious, does nothing to mask his nervousness. In the time of the coronavirus, football is just a beautiful distraction.