International Football
WORLD CUP 2014 STADIUMS BECOME HOME TO CORONAVIRUS VICTIMS
The costly football stadiums Brazil built and refurbished in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup are finding new life as health centres for patients with coronavirus.
Local governments have started signing agreements to use the stadiums – once destined for star-studded matches – as makeshift hospitals and vaccine centres to help deal with an expected surge of Covid-19 cases.
With football in the country suspended until further notice, more than half the clubs in Brazil’s Serie A have given up their stadiums as authorities in densely populated Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro seek to expand hospital capacity to deal with the crisis.
Current South American champions Flamengo are giving control of their famous Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro to health authorities, said club president Rodolfo Landim.
“In this grim moment, I wanted to invite our great Red and Black nation to renew hope and work for better days. Let us take care of our elders, help those who need it most,” he wrote in a message to supporters.
Authorities in Sao Paulo – Brazil’s biggest city – said they would install 200 beds in a field hospital at the Pacaembu municipal stadium to relieve pressure on the city’s hospitals. Work is already underway at the venue – where football legend Pele played hundreds of matches for Santos FC – while two of the city’s big clubs were also lending a hand.
Santos announced that a temporary clinic would be set up in one of the lounges inside its Vila Belmiro stadium.
Corinthians said they have made their Itaquerao stadium and their training headquarters available “so that the authorities can evaluate how they can be used to combat the spread of the disease”.
On March 23, Allianz Parque, home of the Palmeiras football club in Sao Paulo, a line of people snaked around the outside of the stadium as if a match were about to start. But these were not football fans – they were high-risk Brazilians spaced 3m apart and there to get flu shots.
For Brazilians, it is a useful transformation of structures dubbed “white elephants” that later became symbols of corruption in Latin America’s largest economy.
Back in 2014, the idea of Brazil spending US$11 billion (S$15.7 billion) to host the World Cup was a contentious one, with locals and foreigners alike arguing that a nation struggling to provide basic health care, education and even sewage has no right diverting resources to a football championship.
As construction began, the staggering price tag for the stadiums fuelled a frenzy of protests. One common chant: “We want hospitals with Fifa standards!”
In neighbouring Argentina, six major clubs including Buenos Aires’ Boca Juniors and River Plate have also opened their gates should officials need the space.
Brazil currently has over 4,000 confirmed infections and deaths top 100.
A week ago, Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta had predicted the virus would reach its peak in the country between April and June, anticipating a drop in Covid-19 infections from September.
Mandetta warned the health system in the country of 210 million people could reach saturation by the end of April.
–AFP
International Football
England’s German manager Tuchel will not sing the English anthem in his first game
England manager Thomas Tuchel said he would have to “earn the right” to sing the national anthem, God Save the King, after announcing his 26-man squad on Friday ahead of the team’s World Cup qualifiers.
Tuchel, who was appointed as Gareth Southgate’s successor in October and named his first squad to face Albania and Latvia this month, said he would not sing the anthem in his first games in charge.
“It means a lot to me, I can assure you, but I can feel that because it is so meaningful and it is so emotional and it is so powerful, the national anthem, that I have to earn my right to sing it,” the 51-year-old German told a news conference.
Former caretaker manager Lee Carsley was criticised last year for not singing the anthem during his tenure.
However, Tuchel added that while he is proud to be in charge of the team and knows the words to the anthem, he plans to earn the right with results.
“Maybe I have to dive more into the culture and earn my right from you, from the players, from the supporters, so everyone feels like ‘he should sing it now, he’s one of our own, he’s the English manager, he should sing it’,” he said.
-Reuters
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Seven medical professionals who cared for Argentine football legend Diego Maradona during his final days go on trial Tuesday accused of criminal negligence over his death.
Maradona died on 25 November 2020 aged 60 while recovering from brain surgery for a blood clot, after decades battling cocaine and alcohol addictions.
Each defendant risks between eight and 25 years in prison if convicted of “homicide with possible intent” — allegedly for pursuing a course of action despite knowing it could lead to the footballer’s death.
The passing of the star of the 1986 World Cup plunged Argentina into mourning in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tens of thousands of people queued to bid farewell to the former Boca Juniors and Napoli striker as his body lay in state in the presidential palace.
More than 100 witnesses, including members of Maradona’s family and doctors who tended to him over the years, are expected to take the stand in the long-delayed trial in the Buenos Aires suburb of San Isidro.
The hearings are expected to run until July.
Warning signs
Maradona was found dead in bed two weeks after going under the knife, in a rented house in an exclusive Buenos Aires neighborhood where he was brought after being discharged from hospital.
He was found to have died of a heart attack.
The night nurse said he had seen “warning signs” but had received orders “not to wake” Maradona.
The defendants in the case are a neurosurgeon, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a medical coordinator, a nursing coordinator, a doctor and the night nurse.
The day nurse, who found Maradona dead, asked to be tried by jury separately.
Prosecutors have accused the medical team of pushing for Maradona to receive home care, which proved “reckless” and “totally deficient.”
They allege the footballer was abandoned to his fate for a “prolonged, agonizing period” before his death.
A panel of 20 medical experts convened by Argentina’s public prosecutor concluded in 2021 that Maradona “would have had a better chance of survival” with adequate treatment in an appropriate medical facility.
The residence where he was staying notably had no defibrillator.
Maradona’s family claim that leaked audio and text messages show that the star’s health was in imminent danger, said Mario Baudry, a lawyer for Maradona’s son Dieguito.
He said the messages showed the medical team’s strategy was to try and ensure that Diego’s daughters did not intervene “because if they did, they (the medical staff) would lose their money.”
‘Justice for Diego’
The accused all deny responsibility in the star’s death.
Vadim Mischanchuk, lawyer for psychiatrist Agustina Cosachov, said he was “very optimistic” of an acquittal, arguing his client was in charge of Maradona’s mental, not physical health.
In the La Paternal neighborhood of Buenos Aires where the player nicknamed “El Pibe de Oro” (The Golden Boy) revealed his prodigious talent as a player for Argentinos Juniors in the 1970s, graffiti urging “Justice for Diego!” was daubed on walls ahead of the trial.
“All society needs to know… what really happened, who abandoned him… and whoever is responsible must pay the price,” pensioner Hilda Pereira told AFP.
Maradona “did not deserve to die as he died, alone,” she added, her voice quavering.
For its part, Argentina’s left-wing Pagina 12 newspaper wondered: “Will anyone be found guilty for Maradona’s death?”
-AFP
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Argentina will begin a trial this week into the medical team of late soccer icon Diego Maradona over homicide by negligence, a case that has charged up emotions in the country where the World Cup winner still commands almost God-like reverence.
The trial, expected to last for months, starts on Tuesday, over four years after Maradona’s death in November 2020 from heart failure at age 60 after undergoing brain surgery days earlier. His medical team generally rejects the charges.
A court in San Isidro, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, will listen to nearly 120 testimonies. The defendants are charged with “simple homicide with eventual intent” in the treatment of the former Boca Juniors and Napoli player.
Maradona’s death rocked the South American nation where he was revered, prompting a period of mourning and angry finger pointing about who was to blame after the icon’s years-long battle with addiction and ill health.
Nicknamed “D10S”, a play on the Spanish word for god, and “Pelusa” for his prominent hair, Maradona battled alcohol and drug addiction, but was adored – including in tattoos, opens new tab – for his flawed genius that led Argentina to World Cup glory in 1986.
That sharpened anger around his death, while a medical board appointed to investigate the circumstances concluded in early 2021 that the soccer star’s medical team had acted in an “inappropriate, deficient and reckless manner”.
“I hope there’s justice because they killed him. Diego (Maradona) should be alive,” Argentina merchant Luis Alberto Suarez told Reuters in Buenos Aires. “They didn’t take care of him.”
A medical board appointed to investigate Maradona’s death found in early 2021 that the soccer star’s medical team acted in an “inappropriate, deficient and reckless manner”.
Not everyone was so sure, however.
“I can only speak from what I see from the outside. But we can’t say if they were wrong or not,” said self-employed worker Martin Milei.
“In hindsight, they got it completely wrong. But I think there are more people responsible than what’s being said.”
Unemployed Argentine Pablo Knopfler said he hoped that the trial would uncover the truth.
“I hope there’s a trial to know with more clarity what happened to Diego,” he said. “Perhaps there’s someone up above us or maybe Diego himself who wants to shed light on what happened to him so that the truth is revealed.”
Reuters
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