They left pre-season and then the authorities closed the city. While they train without time in Spain, they live pending their families behind the iron curtain that the coronavirus lowered.
Hector Gambini
03/06/2020 - 7:01
- Clarín.com
- sports
If the worst of the plague is death, what follows is banishment .
The coronavirus started in Wuhan, China, where there is a first division football team. This team, the Wuhan Zall, left the city on January 3 to escape the icy winter and look for warmer lands where to stretch muscles and exercise with the ball in a preseason that began with all the desire and new technical director, a Spanish called José González.
x
Like the swallows, they sought the warmth of the climate 1,000 kilometers south of Wuhan, in Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, where they began to work physical and tactical for the dreamed objective of maintaining the category. Stay first. They never thought they would be in a geographical limbo without knowing when they will return to hug their parents, or their children.
They had ascended the previous year and in their experience in the superior category they finished sixth, in a professional football league that incorporates foreigners (there passed Ezequiel Lavezzi, Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano) and is increasingly competitive. Nothing bad.
Look also
Wuhan Zall FC, the team from the city where the coronavirus was born that cannot return home
But the virus began to spread in his city and the alarm spread. Although they were already 1,000 kilometers away, the 27 players on the Wuhan squad were checked on January 9 and all tests were negative.
They continued training, then, under the planned plan: finish on 23 and travel on 24 to Wuhan to spend the Spring family party (a mass celebration that in China equals Western Christmas) and rest for a week before following the preseason in Spain, where they had already been in the beginning of 2019.
It could not be: on the 23rd, just when they finished the routine of running with a harness carrying weight and dodging orange cones by passing the ball from one foot to the other, the city of Wuhan, the home of most players and their families, It was sealed. Closed for them, for China and for the world.
No one else could enter or leave. Those who stayed inside are still there, if they managed to survive the mortality of the virus. Those left out cannot return to who knows when.
The boys of the Wuhan Zall have the anguish of surprise and forced exile in their faces. But they are motivated by Madrid with the news that the outbreak, along with the world, loses some of its initial brutality in China, and the expectation of the classic Real Madrid - Barcelona for which they had been specially invited by La Spanish League, and they saw in a box of the Bernabéu stadium itself.
The Wuhan Zall FC team during their visit to Real Madrid.
Some of the members of the campus have children in Wuhan whom they have not seen for more than 60 days . Several of them have relatives infected with the coronavirus. One lost his grandmother . None can return, and have been around the world since then, as a ship that is not drifting but also has no safe harbor or estimated navigation schedule.
The Wuhan Zall was founded in 2009 and is a real pride of the football fans of that city of 11 million inhabitants, in central China. A year earlier, his predecessor, Wuhan Guanggu , had disappeared after a league match with the capital's powerful team, Beijing Guoan . The Wuhan lost 3-0 and the match ended in a pitched battle . By way of complaint about the arbitration and what they considered its unhappy consequences, the team withdrew from the league and it pulverized it.
There, the Wuhan Guanggu brings problems; Wuhan Guanggu doesn't exist anymore.
On that basis, the Wuhan Zall was born, which started in the third division and was climbing until the ascent to first in 2018, where he currently plays.
With the epidemic declared, the players left China for Turkey, via Shanghai, and finally landed in Spain, on January 29.
They did not go unnoticed. "Man, when we arrived in Malaga they looked at us as if we were the virus walking ... but hey, we must also understand that people fear the unknown," says DT González to Clarín , on a cold morning in Madrid.
To leave the airport they had to wait for the approval of the Ministry of Health and the Junta de Andalucía, which proved that none of them had symptoms of any kind or was the carrier of the virus. Nor would it be, unless they were infected in Spain: the incubation period is 14 days and they had been 23 since they had left Wuhan.
The Chinese players then went to Cádiz and took refuge in a private city of rich and famous called Sotogrande , with 2,500 millionaire neighbors, horses and polo fields. The first surprise was that the training courts they had hired months in advance had been discharged without further arguments . The second, that the first scheduled friendly match, with a Russian team called Krasnodar , would not be played either. The Russians canceled almost about the time.
The fan of Wuhan Zall FC in a Chinese League match that is suspended.
Then they became Chinese boys with the home forbidden and professional players with the football forbidden, without fields to train or rivals to practice with. A kind of eternal and cruel training where you have to be prepared to play with anyone and never return home.
If the second worst of the plague is banishment, what follows is the contempt of others.
The cancellations of the Russians were followed by others from a Swedish club, another Czech (with whom they had played a year before drawing 1-1 in Prague) and another Norwegian. Suddenly, everyone announced that they could not travel to the Costa del Sol to play against this group of Chinese boys. The reasons were unlikely excuses .
Until the Andalusian neighbors appeared.
After a new rejection of the Europa Point in Gibraltar, the one who gave the approval to face them was the Almunecar City of Granada.
The Chinese players looked forward to the arrival of the rivals, although it was not all they had imagined. The micro did not lower some young people like them but older gentlemen: the club sent its senior version. Never mind. The soccer players finally had some football. Or something that seemed quite similar.
As the days went by, the face of their neighbors in Sotogrande also changed, who saw that the coronavirus was spreading throughout Spain except where the boys of the Wuhan Zall walked, closely followed by health technicians from the Andalusian administration who They made up to two controls per day always with the same result: negative.
The mayor of the area, Juan Carlos Ruiz, immediately clarified that everything is fine with the Chinese soccer players but the municipality is in daily contact with the health authorities: “They have given us guarantees and then there is no problem,” he told A local newspaper.
A month after having landed in Malaga, players and their coaches appear in Madrid, at the headquarters of the Spanish League that awaits them with a tribute, a donation (5 million liters of disinfectant, grateful for the charge of Business of the Chinese embassy, present at the event) and a gift, tickets for the classic.
There they are received by La Liga ambassadors such as Fernando Sanz (former Real Madrid and Malaga), Fernando Morientes (scorer of Real Madrid and the Spanish team), Javier Díaz (former Barcelona) and Gaizka Mendieta (Valencia, Barcelona, Spanish National Team).
Wuhan Zall's team in Madrid during their course in Europe, unable to return to China.
The team captain, a short, vivacious-eyed boy named Yao Hao Lin, sits among them all, asks for the microphone and says, with touching simplicity: “It is not easy for us. We miss a lot and are aware of our families, who are going through tremendous difficulties, but we have a lot of perseverance to face this and return to normal. I tell them that we are going to overcome this disease, defeat this epidemic and fulfill our dream of playing again in Wuhan very soon. ”
No longer win or maintain the category. Don't even get rivals scared by ignorance of fear. Just come back. That gardeliano dream in a Chinese boy anchored in Spain.
They look serious, respectfully, their peers. Everyone wears orange sportswear with bright blacks, the colors of the club.
As it is noon, some start checking their cell phones. Chinese night is the best time to greet the family and ask them about the news of the day. One of the boys's face lights up: they are telling him right now that an infected relative is recovering without major problems and that the exclusive hospital they had built in record time has just discharged his last patient and will close, because the cases go down and it is no longer necessary.
José González is 53 years old and was a Málaga coach, before embarking on the Chinese experience as a field assistant for another incumbent DT. He was now leading the Wuhan preseason when he met the news that the disease was an epidemic and now a pandemic.
“The hardest moment was when they learned that they were closing their city. Many of these boys are parents and left their wives and babies there . That is a tremendous experience for anyone and much more for these young boys, ” says Clarín .
“The work they do training and the desire they put forward are really admirable,” he completes. "They gave their relatives a lot of optimism and a good face to face this that nobody expected . "
Origins of the coronavirus
Data as of March 4
Infographic: Clarín
Far away, 12,000 kilometers away from where the boys with whom no one wants to play train, Wuhan dawns with empty streets and people confined in their homes, managing special permits to look out on the sidewalk and only for reasons of force majeure, How to get food
González says that this experience confronts him with learning about human behavior and the lessons that can be taken from "attitudes such as these boys, who train with perseverance on the court while occupying their roles as children, siblings, husbands and worried parents. when training ends. That behavior makes you think about the limits of human capacity. "
Captain Yao Lin says he admires Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and although Cristiano is no longer at Real Madrid he would like the classic "to be a great match that wins the best."
It shows that he swells for the Barsa de Messi but does not say it because we are in Madrid and because the giants Sanz and Morientes, idols of the meringue fans, watch him closely. Maybe that intimidates him. At night he won the Madrid 2-0 and the boys mixed among the 80,000 spectators of the Bernabéu.
Although Spain already had more than 150 confirmed cases of coronavirus (now exceeding 200), only a handful of fans wore chinstrap on the stands.
But the match passed and the coronavirus is still there.
That is why the young captain chooses his words to say them firm, after a pause that stuns a little because of the naked sensibility and because it makes Messi and Zidane's Real Madrid super-players look like plasticine dolls. That the show makes life happy, but life is something else: "Wuhan is a heroic city," he says.
It does not fly a fly. Soccer sometimes shakes with its silences.
Madrid. Special delivery
Coronavirus in figures
Data as of March 4
Infographic: Clarín
