Late on Sunday afternoon, Robin Leproux fronted up to the press concerning PSG’s postponed match against Marseille. The PSG president discussed the health of his players as well as the incidents in Marseille…
How do you feel about this match being postponed?“We were asked to travel to Marseille when we’d revealed that Ludovic Giuly and Mamadou Sakho were infected with swine flu. We headed to Marseille with the idea of playing and looking for the win. But even on Saturday I was not convinced the game would go ahead because we were waiting on the result of tests on Jérémy Clément, as well as seeing how the other players left on Sunday morning. What I regret, and I said this to LFP president Frédéric Thiriez, is that at 1pm on Saturday, the LFP released a statement claiming that the game was going ahead. I told him to keep an eye on things because we didn’t have all the relative information, such as Jérémy Clément’s results. I told him to be prudent and not tell PSG fans that the game was categorically going ahead.” How are the players?
“They’re in their hotel in Marseille and are as good as you can be when you’ve got the flu. Some have it, and others may have it soon. They will catch a plane back to Paris this evening. Ludovic Giuly, Mamadou Sakho and Jérémy Clément have been infected with the H1N1, along with another player and a member of the staff.”
“He was better. He was probably the one player that wasn’t going to infect anyone. As soon as we had two players test positive, the question was whether or not the whole squad had been exposed to the virus. It would normally be impossible to get tests done on the weekend, but we got them done. We knew that Jérémy hadn’t been feeling well all week but was better and trained normally on Saturday. According to the doctors, the cluster principal means that as soon as you have three infected players in a team there’s a very high percentage chance that the whole squad has been infected. Therefore we wanted to know if Jérémy had had the H1N1 virus. The results showed that he was also carrying the virus. It was at that moment we knew that probably the whole group had the virus.” Unfortunately, there were some incidents between the supporters in Marseille...
“This is the subject that concerns us the most because we wanted to avoid this type of thing. We tried to anticipate this problem, but of course, with hundreds of PSG fans in Marseille, tempers frayed a little... The club’s director of security is currently on the ground along with Philippe Boindrieux and they are working with the police and the OM security team. What we want is that as many PSG fans as possible can get back to Paris as soon as possible. The biggest problem is the fans that came by coach because the drivers must have a minimum rest period before they get back behind the wheel and that is a real problem. We’re trying to get some new wagons added to get them back on train. At the moment, there are no seriously injured people, but there are a few with superficial injuries...”
