With 5 players positive for covid and 2 injured, the BLMA is forced to postpone its meetings against Venice and Salamanca. Faced with the epidemic, the women’s basketball team must completely reorganize as it prepares to reach the European top 8 for the second time.
The Club de Lattes-Montpellier has just announced it: it will not play its next two games. Yet fourth in its group, and one victory away from qualifying for the quarter-finals of the Euroleague, the BLMA has just obtained the postponement of its meeting against Venice scheduled for this Wednesday, and against Salamanca organized this Saturday at home .
In question, the covid epidemic which rages within the team. 5 players and their coach are currently positive. All the others are contact cases. And with 2 more injured, impossible for the BLMA to ensure its next meetings. “So far, we hadn’t been affected too much, it’s really the first time that we’ve been severely affected”, testifies Valéry Demory, the coach. “I think it’s the fact of traveling that infects us. We come back from Riga (in Latvia) and we catch it when we had nothing so far. Same for Bourges who is coming back from England.”
Most players like Valéry Demory are asymptomatic but two of them are suffering.
Between the sick, the covid positives and the contact cases, it is difficult to juggle and organize training serenely and without risk of contamination. “We make working groups, one with those who have nothing and another with those who are positive”, says Valéry Demory. “The problem is that not everyone tests positive on the same day, you have to constantly juggle all that.”
As long as we don’t have a match, it’s fine, we manage. But how to prepare for the next match without being able to train collectively?
Valéry Demory, BLMA coach
The coach has been declared positive but is at the end of the protocol. He will be able to resume training tomorrow for those who have not been affected.
In addition to the organizational difficulty, it is the future that worries the team. Because these two matches have been postponed, we will have to find a place for them later in an already very busy schedule. “In our group, all the teams have postponed their matches”, explains the coach. “The calendar is going to be jostled, we will play every 48 hours and that is where we must not have any injuries, otherwise we are dead. But everyone will be in the same boat, so there will be fairness. Only the teams with the largest squads will be advantaged. This season promises to be even more complicated than the previous ones.
BLMA are due to play their next game in Moscow but it too risks being postponed. There is, in fact, little chance that the players will be declared negative for covid by Tuesday.
