Homesick and tired Wuhan Zall await return

MARBELLA (Spain) • Many times, Yao Hanlin has pictured what his homecoming will look like. There will be a tearful reunion with his wife and his infant son, an embrace for his mother and then there will be bowls full of his favourite spicy, dry noodles.

For more than 60 days, Yao and his teammates on Wuhan Zall, a football team in the Chinese Super League, have lived in a sort of sporting purgatory.

Locked out of Wuhan since Jan 22, when the city was quarantined to try to slow the coronavirus outbreak while they were on a pre-season trip to Guangzhou, the players and their coaches have spent the last six weeks in temporary exile on the palm-fringed Costa del Sol in Spain, dreaming of home.

The players have trained most days on manicured fields under clear blue skies, and they have filled their free time by shopping at designer stores and indulging in sightseeing excursions.

They were invited guests at a Clasico match between Real Madrid and Barcelona, and eager observers of beautiful Andalusian sunsets.

But thoughts of relatives sealed off from the outside world, of friends and grandparents struggling with the virus, were hard to set aside.

The players of Wuhan Zall are not sick. But they are tired.

"Maybe I will cry a little bit," Yao, a Wuhan native and the team's longest-serving player, said as he contemplated the moment he will finally set foot in his home.

"We really miss our families, our children. Maybe they forget what we look like."

The team's presence in Marbella at a luxury hotel, even after so many weeks away, still feels incongruous.

Sitting on the balcony of the sparsely populated hotel, Yao recalled the moment his world fell apart.

He was at a training camp in Guangzhou on Jan 22 when a sudden flurry of messages started pinging into various chat groups on his cellphone. The phone, he said, grew so hot that he needed to throw it to the ground.

The messages informed Yao - and his teammates, who received similar ones - that Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, would be sealed off.

By then, Yao had already been away from his wife and son for a month; he was desperately looking forward to rejoining them for Chinese New Year celebrations later that week.

"I felt broken," he said.

While some of his teammates were released, allowed to go home to cities that were unaffected by the Chinese government's emergency measures, Yao and a dozen or so others from Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, had to make do with video calls to loved ones.

A few days later, on Jan 29, the team flew to Spain for a final camp, a tune-up before the new season, which was supposed to start on Feb 22.

By the time they arrived, Wuhan had become almost synonymous with the coronavirus.

Photographers and camera crews met the team at the airport in Malaga, where Jose Gonzalez, a Spaniard hired to coach Wuhan in January, held a news conference attempting to assuage concerns.

He could sense trouble was brewing. The regional government had been forced to issue a statement saying precautions would be taken with the Chinese team, that its presence would not imperil public health.

A day before the team arrived, the hotel where it had reserved rooms suddenly cancelled the bookings. Then the owner of the training field where the team was to hold its practice sessions said a Russian team that was using the adjoining field had complained; Wuhan Zall, he said, would have to find somewhere else to train.

The final insult arrived when teams from Scandinavia and Russia who had agreed to take part in preseason games called them off.

"They thought the virus itself was coming," said Gonzalez.

The 53-year-old has yet to oversee an official game, but he has become a calming presence, a point of reassurance, in the lives of players who, three months ago, had never heard of him.

He told them not to take the reaction personally, that it was mostly a fear of the unknown. The players and staff took the words to heart.

"It's like saying you come from a town, and the town is called Ebola," said one team official, You Li.

While the club's management decided it was best for everyone to remain in Spain, that equation has changed as the coronavirus started to take a heavier toll in the country - which now has more than 6,000 confirmed cases, second only to Italy (21,000) in Europe.

On Friday, Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declared a state of emergency, giving the government the power to lock down cities, restrict the movement of citizens and ration goods.

"We were running away from a difficult situation in China," Gonzalez said, "and now we are running away from a difficult one in Spain."

The team is planning to set up another camp in Shenzhen. That means another hotel, another new training field, another wait.

Gonzalez said that he has used the training sessions as a way of distracting his squad from thoughts of home, of forging a team.

"Luckily, when they are playing football, they have a few hours a day when they can forget everything," he said. "The biggest smiles I have seen have been on the football field."

NYTIMES