Chapecoense

Stricken Chapecoense to play final game of the season with youth players?

By Danielle Joynson, Staff Reporter | 01 December 2016

Chapecoense may have to field their youth players in the final game of the season just two weeks after 19 of their first-team members were killed in a plane crash.

Acting club president of Chapecoense, Ivan Tozzo, has revealed that the grief-stricken club may have to play their youth players in the final game of the season next week.

The Brazilian outfit lost 19 players in Monday night's tragic plane crash, which took the lives of 76 people, including manager Caio Junior and his coaching staff.

The flight, which was taking the team to Colombia for the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final against Atletico Nacional, plunged into a mountainside near Medellin after the aircraft reportedly ran out of fuel.

The final round of Serie A games were postponed after the Brazilian Football Federation called for seven days of mourning, and now Tozzo has claimed that CFB president Marco Polo del Nero wants the matches to be played two weeks after the tragedy on the weekend of December 11 and 12.

Due to the number of fatalities to the first team, Chapecoense may have to field players from their academy for the game against Atletico Mineiro.

"[Del Nero] told me, 'This game has to happen. It has to be a big celebration,'" Sky Sports News quotes Tozzo as saying. "I responded, 'We haven't got 11 players.'

"He said 'Yes, you do. You have the junior team; the team that you have on medical recovery. Five or six injured players on standby, and complete the team with the juniors. The result does not matter. We have to have a great ceremony, the kind that Chapeco and Chapecoense deserve. The kind the region deserves, that Santa Catarina state deserves and that Brazil deserves'."

The majority of the cabin crew, as well as 20 journalists were killed in the crash.