‘Fortnightly medical check-up for athletes is necessary’

BENGALURU: The entire world is looking forward to leap into normalcy with new norms in place. Abundant precautions are a must to deal with the COVID-19 situation until the time vaccines are rolled out. Sporting activities, including football, need to reboot post lockdown as children are eager to get back to sports, and this will help strengthen their immune system as well.

We are keen to start soon, following the government advisories and putting in place precautionary measures like compulsory use of masks and gloves, temperature checks and sanitisation before and after training. We have re-designed our training programmes to avoid physical contacts for initial months and focus on physical strengthening and conditioning and technical drills.

We will avoid training games until we get more of a handle on the situation. We’ve learnt a lot over the last two months to use technology to connect with players. We will carry forward our learnings to integrate with our on-field training. Our tactical sessions, match analysis sessions, sports nutrition and sports psychology sessions will continue over technology platforms.

Additional measures can include breaking up the training batch sizes into half and enforcing locality-based training. Medical check-up for the trainees every fortnight is also necessary. Many of us are paranoid now but we need to learn to move forward. Beginning of sports training will be a positive step in that direction and we are ready from our side.