The tribulations of the current European football championship give a lot of concern to UEFA, which plays travel agencies and to WHO, which follows contamination curves. The qualifiers are dispatched this weekend to Rome, Munich and to Baku but it is the stage last night in Saint Petersburg that seems problematic. In the previous match in the capital of the tsars, 300 Finnish supporters had come home with the covid as a bonus.
The pandemic is soaring in Russia that Putin himself has seen fit to invite his super-suspicious fellow citizens to be vaccinated. The English, as we know, have AstraZeneca in their arms. They nevertheless remain, via the Delta variant, the first propagators of the virus, true ambassadors of the various variants. Ugly ducks of competitions for half a century, the English Lions have regained their fangs since their victory over Germany and the prospect of playing next week’s semi-finals and final in London’s temple of football, Wembley.
England is jubilant, the WHO is coughing. Hundreds of Scots have brought the virus back from Wembley and pubs to London where their team were playing as neighbors in mid-June. To keep their historic chance to play at home, England had to raise the stadium’s gauge to 60,000 spectators, which made the cautious “Mutti” Merkel bitch yesterday. It is easy to imagine the giant cluster that Boris’ country and its beer pumps could become in the event of English triumph. And this even in the absence of foreign spectators, subject to quarantine.
Portugal was the first to open its borders to English tourists, in mid-May, and repents today. He has just decreed the return of the curfew in Lisbon. Everyone is praying that England, once again an island, will keep the virus and its variants to herself, but everyone knows that it never happens like that. With its missed penalty, France will have put at least all the assets on its side.
–
