Barca begin training, hopes up for Liga resumption
>>BARCELONA: Barcelona returned to training on Friday after the La Liga champions allowed their stars to enter their facility to prepare for a potential restart to football in Spain.
Lionel Messi and company took the fields at Joan Gamper training centre for individual sessions, for which the players arrived alone in kit and took to the three pitches without passing through the changing rooms.
As well as doing their routines, they were also subjected to tests to see what effect two months of coronavirus quarantine has had on their bodies.
“Finally we are getting back to normal. We hope to carry on and that soon we can get back to enjoying what we like to do most,” Arturo Vidal told sports daily Marca.
Sevilla, Villarreal, Osasuna and Leganes also returned to training, while Real Madrid — who were two points behind league leaders Barca when play stopped in mid-March — will likely start again tomorrow should their players pass virus tests carried out on Wednesday.
That would mark almost two months since Real had been placed in quarantine following a positive test for a member of the club’s basketball team.
According to Spanish media, none of Real’s players have suffered from virus symptoms, but Zinedine Zidane will have to do without Serb attacker Luka Jovic after Real announced on Friday he had fractured his right heel.
Footballers in Spain have restarted training following the announcement last week of government plan that aims to end quarantine for professional players.
Individual training sessions are the first step to what La Liga hopes will be a return to action in June that will complete the 2019-20 season behind closed doors.
Meanwhile Serie A giants Inter Milan and AC Milan were both back training on Friday two months after a strict lockdown which has hit the northern Italian city hard.
Inter said all their players and staff had tested negative for the coronavirus on Friday, clearing the way for them to return to individual training.
Their city rivals resumed earlier in the week with club technical director Paolo Maldini warning “not going back on the pitch would be a disaster”.
The city in the northern Lombardy region is the epicentre of Italy’s Covid19 outbreak, one of the worst in Europe.
It has suffered some 15,000 deaths, around half of Italy’s 30,000 coronavirus fatalities, since the outbreak first erupted in early March.