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What does the UEFA regulation say and how does our case differ from the others?
Nov. 18, 2020, 7 a.m.
The match of the sixth day of the League of Nations between Switzerland and Ukraine was canceled. The reason for this decision was the banning of the match by the chief physician of the canton of Lucerne, where the match was supposed to take place.
The situation with our team is far from being the first case of cancellation or postponement of a match in the period of a pandemic due to the detection of coronavirus in players of one of the teams. First of all, here I remind you of the examples of the Serie A duel between Juventus and Napoli, which did not take place in early October, and the canceled match between the teams of Romania and Norway in the Nations League, which was supposed to it would be played on November 15.
In the first case, Napoli received a technical defeat (0: 3). This decision caused a lot of outrage from the club representatives and the Neapolitan fans, but if you delve into the regulations, you can easily understand that the verdict of the Series A Disciplinary Committee was completely fair. Napoli did not fly to the Turin match after discovering the coronavirus in two of their players.
But according to the Covid protocol of the Italian Championship adopted before the start of the season, such conditions are not a sufficient reason not to appear for the game. Neapolitans could hide behind a ban on leaving the city from local authorities, but the health authority simply classified the trip to Turin as “difficult”, while there was no direct ban. As a result, the Disciplinary Committee had no reason to recognize the situation as force majeure and the Neapolitans received a technical defeat for not showing up for the game.
The Norwegian team found themselves in a similar situation. The team received a ban from local authorities to leave the country after the coronavirus was detected in only one player on the team. In fact, this is the same violation of the UEFA Return to Play Protocol, as in the case of Napoli, and the Norwegian team will most likely also face a technical defeat.
And what does the regulation say about the situation with the Ukraine team? All the players on our team were quarantined the day before. This means that they must be isolated and therefore cannot participate in the duel. In this case, according to the official UEFA Return to Play Protocol, the match could take place the next day, November 18, if at least 13 other players could replace the isolated Ukrainians.
But the match was canceled anyway, as the Ukrainian Football Association informed UEFA that it would not be able to send new players to Lucerne to participate in the match. In such a case, UEFA should reschedule the match for another date, if possible. But in the current conditions of the coronavirus, this probability is practically nil, because the match schedule is already very tight, and the next international break is scheduled for March next year.
If it is not possible to postpone the match, the UEFA Control, Disciplinary and Ethics Body must decide. The national team, because of whose fault the match did not take place, is recognized as the loser, unless KDEI decides that the match was not played due to the fault of both sides or no fault of the parties.
The situation with our national team’s match falls on the last point, because there is no side to blame for the uncontested match: both Switzerland and Ukraine expressed their willingness to play this match to the end.
This is exactly what makes our case different from the examples of Norway and Italy, where the teams, Napoli and the Norwegian national team, respectively, were unable to attend their matches. Although there were objective reasons for this in the form of a ban on such a trip by local authorities, the lack of attendance at the game is a reinforced concrete reason for awarding a technical 0: 3.
Ukraine came into the game and, like Switzerland, was ready to play it. Therefore, the only obvious way out for UEFA in the case of the Switzerland-Ukraine match is the extreme option: determining the winner by draw. In such a scenario, there are three possible options for our team: a 1: 0 win, a 0: 0 draw or a 0: 1 loss. The first two allow our team to occupy third place in their group and remain in League A of this tournament, while in case of defeat Switzerland will bypass our national team in additional indicators (head-to-head matches) and with six points will send Shevchenko’s team to League B.
This is what the situation looks like at first glance, but there are always traps. We hope that, even if they are found, they will not play against the Ukrainian team.
Earlier, Switzerland’s head coach Vladimir Petkovic said that his team always wants to win on the field.
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