ROMA midfielder Javier Pastore is resigned to the Serie A season being lost to the annals of time due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Some teams have as many as 13 games left to complete after Italian football became one of the earliest victims of the pandemic.
Pastore has warned people not to underestimate the virus’ dangerCredit: Getty Images – Getty
With no end in sight to the current suspension blanketing sport across the continent, there are a number of issues to contend with even once life begins to return to normality.
For Pastore, the factor of how long it will take to return players to match fitness is severely detrimental to ever getting the 2019/20 season completed.
The midfielder told Radio Impacto, via Goal: “We’ll see if we play again from this season or the next.
“To be honest, I think it’ll be impossible to finish the season, as we need at least 20-30 days of training to be ready.
“All the clubs will lose money, but I think it’s pretty much impossible to resume where we left off. It would mean ending later and later, so having to move the start of the next campaign.
“But we can’t do that, because next summer there’s the Euros, the Copa America, etc.”
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The Argentine described how each Roma player is training alone at home and sending their metrics back to the club for monitoring.
Should they get back in action, the Giallorossi will find themselves three points off Atalanta in the race for fourth-place, having played a game more.
The league was terminated with the title race in the balance, only a point separating Juventus and Lazio, while only three points keep five teams apart in the relegation battle – from 18th to 14th.
As of Sunday, 53,578 people in Italy had been diagnosed with coronavirus as the pandemic ravaged the peninsula.
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Of those, 4,825 have died, prompting Pastore, 30, to warn others not to underestimate its danger.
He added: “Don’t believe the false stories that come out, the truth is this is an illness that is not just dangerous for the elderly.
“We’ve been dealing with this virus for a month and the problem didn’t seem that important at first, but after two weeks, it was chaos.”
Former club president of Real Madrid Lorenzo Sanz dead at 76 after testing positive for coronavirus and having a week-long fever
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
