Anger in FC Barcelona's Women team: "We still don't understand how the Football Federation made us travel to Madrid"

BarcelonaWith irony and indignation: this is how the players and the technical team of the Barça Women's team have reacted after the postponement of the match that had to be played this Saturday against Madrid CFF. The team, which moved to Madrid by train on Friday, arrived at the state capital while the Storm Filomena had already buried the city under the snow. "If nobody tells you the opposite, you have to travel. If the match is not suspended, you have to show up", FC Barcelona sources explained.

Friday night, when the team had already arrived at the hotel, the Madrid club asked the Spanish Federation to suspend the game. Besides the clear consequences of the snow, the Community of Madrid has closed all sports facilities and, therefore, it is impossible for the match to be played this weekend. "We are stuck in the hotel in Madrid without being able to move, without knowing when we will be able to return to Barcelona and obviously the match [has been] suspended. We are people above everything, coherence, please...", wrote Aitana Bonmatí on Twitter.

"We would have liked the Federation to have responded to our request to postpone the match before we left Barcelona. I think that, for sure, in the future, all of us have to consider what is the best way to proceed in this sense. It is no longer a question of playing or not playing a match, but of putting a group of people at risk", Markel Zubizarreta, sports director of the Women's Barça, explained in a speech on Catalunya Ràdio this midday.

Social networks have been filled with complaints from both players and staff. The azulgrana coach Lluís Cortés, through a photograph of his view from the hotel, ironically said a few minutes before 12.30 pm, when the match had to be played: "Come on, we'll start in fifteen minutes!"

The first to speak out was Melanie Serrano, who tweeted a few minutes after the suspension of the match became official. "We still don't understand how the Spanish Football Federation made us travel to Madrid. One day we'll start doing things with consistency and common sense". "As in Norway, I can't understand how the Spanish Federation thought it would be safe to send a team travelling through mountains when the weather forecast shows a yellow and orange level of danger, due to the storm passing through the centre of Spain", Graham Hansen confessed.

"Everyone knows this situation is bad. If this could have been foreseen earlier, or a previous suspension... If nobody tells us that it has been suspended, we have to go", the club explains. At the moment, the return to Barcelona is not clear and this also affects the Super Cup that has to be played next week. "The Federation told us that we had to travel to Almeria on Monday. This is our intention but today we still don't know how or when we will get to Barcelona", Zubizarreta explained. The team will try to return to the Catalan capital on Sunday, if the storm allows it.