The Brazil-Argentina match, for the sixth date of the South American qualifiers for the World Cup in Qatar, was suspended due to the violation of the sanitary protocol committed by four Albiceleste players.
Of the new edition of the ‘Superclásico de las Américas’, which faced the first two teams in the qualifying round, only six minutes were played.
The Venezuelan referee Jesús Valenzuela and the field commissioners formalized the suspension of the match by the South American Football Confederation (Conmebol), which forwarded the final decision on the incident to FIFA, responsible for the World Cup qualifiers.
The decision was made after Argentina decided to withdraw its team after prosecutors from Brazil’s National Sanitary Surveillance Agency (Anvisa, regulator) stormed the field, six minutes later, after the complaint that four players had provided false information in immigration.
The athletes are Emiliano Martínez and Emiliano Buendía (Aston Villa) and Cristian Romero and Giovani Lo Celso (Tottenham), who, after performing the previous week with their London clubs, traveled to South America to join the Argentine team.
Current Brazilian health regulations require that people who have been in the United Kingdom, India and South Africa in the last 14 days must comply with a mandatory 10-day quarantine and, according to Anvisa, athletes provided “false information” in this regard during their registration process. immigration.
Martínez, Romero and Lo Celso had jumped onto the field as starters, while Buendía was in the reserve bank. The four players arrived in Brazil on Friday from Caracas, where Argentina defeated Venezuela 1-3 on Thursday the previous day.
With the interruption of the match at the Neo Química Arena stadium in Sao Paulo, Argentina decided to withdraw and lock themselves in the dressing room.
Later, captain Lionel Messi was the only one who came out to talk with his Brazilian counterpart Neymar and Marquinhos, teammates in the French Paris Saint Germain, and with local coach Tite and Dani Alves, to whom he told them that Argentina would not play without the four players involved in the incident.
Speaking to the TV Globo channel, the president of Anvisa, Antonio Barra Torres, explained that the Argentine delegation had been notified that the four players should remain isolated in the hotel and that when Federal Police agents went to verify they had already left for the stadium.
A few hours before the game, Anvisa officially announced that it asked the Brazilian Federal Police to comply with the “mandatory quarantine or their immediate return to the country of origin” of the footballers, after detecting “non-compliance with the country’s health rules” and “Give false information”.
Pending a FIFA decision on the match, which corresponded to the sixth matchday postponed last March with the worsening of the covid-19 pandemic, Brazil is the leader of the tie with 21 points and 100% performance, escorted by the also undefeated Argentina, with 15 units.
With the match suspended, Brazil decided to hold an open training session for the press and the public of 1,500 guests who were at the Corinthians World Cup stadium and thus prepare for Thursday’s match at the Arena Pernambuco stadium in Recife against Peru.
Argentina, for its part, left the stadium strongly escorted by the Police and went to the hotel in the municipality of Guarulhos, from where it will embark for Buenos Aires and receive Bolivia on Thursday at the Monumental de Núñez stadium. EFE (HN)