Muscat, Oct 10 - The recent decisions issued by the Supreme Committee on Covid-19 on Friday including the prevention of people’s movement and closing all public places and shops between 8 pm and 5 am from October 11 until 24 may impact on the schedules of Omantel league which is supposed to start on October 23. Seven matches on October 23 are scheduled to kick off at 7 pm which means it will finish during the lockdown. Moreover, if the lockdown is extended it could impact the next round scheduled to start on October 28.
According to Shabib al Hosni, Assistant General Secretary of Oman Football Association (OFA), the Omantel League Union will meet on Sunday to discuss and review the current status of the three remaining rounds of the league.
“We are not yet clear whether sporting activities are among the activities to be stopped. We have to wait to receive the clarification from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth in this regard. Sunday’s meeting will clear many things and accordingly will announce the updates’’, he said.
In September, the OFA had announced the schedules of the remaining matches of 2019-2020 season and the dates for the new 2020-21 season which is expected to begin in December. Accordingly, the domestic teams had began the technical preparations after completion of the COVID-19 test and the foreign players had arrived in the Sultanate to join the teams.
Based on the new decision of the Supreme Committee on Covid-19, it also decided to close some activities that were previously reopened and did not comply with the requirements set by the authorities. Some of the social media accounts stated that the sporting activities may be included in the list which is not yet published by the concerned government authorities.
The medical team of OFA has taken high efforts during the past few weeks on implementation the approved OFA medical protocol and precautionary measures that will prevent spreading of the COVID-19 virus. All the training sessions and preparatory matches for the domestic team were done under full implementation of the protocol. OFA also had circulated a memo to all the media panels at the clubs to reduce the attendance of the photographers to one in each team. All this steps are inline to the precautionary approaches to stop spreading the pandemic.
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