All Alone, Belarus Plays On

Aleksandr Hleb, once of Barcelona and Arsenal and likely Belarus’s greatest player, called the lack of concern among both players and authorities “unbelievable,” though in an Instagram post he later watered down his comments.

“Since the Presidential Administration does not see the real need to quarantine the country, the situation is under control,” Hleb wrote. “If there is a real threat to the health of the players, the health of the audience, I’m sure the matches will stop.”

Hleb has taken his family into self-isolation as a precaution. Some fans, evidently, feel the same way. Attendances for the first weekend of the season were around half of what they were last year, though that still meant almost 4,000 people turning up to watch Brest, the defending champion, play its first game.

“The attitude toward coronavirus as a whole is still rather frivolous,” said Maksim Berazinski, the chief executive of Tribuna in Belarus and Ukraine. “This is partly due to the fact that the official authorities have not yet closed borders, schools, universities, and are trying in every way possible to downplay the significance of the problem.

“Many people continue to go to soccer, and are very actively speaking out against the idea of closing the tournament. For our part, as the media, we insist that the necessary measure now is to suspend the championships. The risk to which we expose people is not justified at the moment.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/sports/soccer/soccer-belarus-coronavirus.html