Real Madrid will play the final seven minutes of their league match against Real Sociedad on January 5th after a bomb threat forced the evacuation of the Bernabeu Stadium on Sunday.
About 70,000 people poured out of Real's stadium in central Madrid with the match level at 1-1 after a Basque newspaper received a warning from a caller claiming to represent the Basque separatist group ETA who said there was a bomb in the ground.
Representatives of Madrid and Real Sociedad, a side from the Basque city of San Sebastian, agreed at a meeting at the Spanish Football Federation yesterday to play the remainder of the match at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, January 5th.
Ticket holders from the original match will be able to watch the seven remaining minutes of play, including four minutes of injury-time.
It was the first time a Spanish stadium had been evacuated because of an ETA bomb threat, according to Spanish state radio.
ETA targeted the Bernabeu in May 2002 when a car bomb exploded nearby hours before a Champions League semi-final and 17 people were treated for shock or slight injuries.
Police with sniffer dogs searched the stadium on Sunday and found no bomb. Real Madrid's team were left standing around in the street in their kit after the bomb scare.
Hundreds of fans streamed across the pitch on their way to the exits. Tourists and fans took advantage of the opportunity for a photograph between the famous stadium's goalposts.
"Now we can say it was just a scare, and we hope it won't happen again," Real Madrid's president Florentino Perez said yesterday. "What happened is a very bad precedent . . . It's scary that this sort of thing might become a trend."
"We were scared to death," said the midfielder Ivan Helguera said. "It's a shame that sports and politics get mixed up."
Meanwhile, Arsene Wenger has delivered a thinly-veiled swipe at Real Madrid amid his battle to keep full-back Lauren at Arsenal. Real have haunted Arsenal in the transfer market over recent seasons, snatching Nicolas Anelka away from them before being linked with moves for Patrick Vieira each summer.
Vieira came close to moving to Madrid before the start of this season, only to change his mind at the last minute. Real president Florentino Perez was quoted at the weekend as revealing he had tied up a deal to bring Lauren to the Bernabeu next season.
However, although the former Cameroon international is out of contract at the end of this season, he is not allowed to start talks with other clubs until January 1st. Any contact made before then would, technically, constitute an illegal approach.
"Lauren is out of contract at the end of June and he can sign where he wants on January 1st, but we will try to keep him, Wenger said. "At the moment, he cannot have signed anywhere as it's not allowed."
Arsenal midfielder Freddie Ljungberg is set to miss this weekend's game at Portsmouth as he continues to suffer from an acute migraine and is scheduled to see a neurological specialist for scans this week.
