Liga Ecuabet postpones Barcelona - Independiente del Valle clash set for Monday

The regular phase of the Liga Ecuabet is now behind us, and the championship is entering its hottest stretch: the hexagonal groups deciding the title and relegation, plus the four team group that will hand out the spot in the CONMEBOL Sudamericana. With the schedule tightening up, there was one match that promised to be the headline act: Barcelona against Independiente del Valle. Well, that clash will not be played when it was originally set.

The meeting between the Yellows and the Rayados had a date and kickoff time locked in: this Monday, September 21 at 7:30 p.m. at the Estadio Monumental. Liga Ecuabet confirmed that the match has been postponed and that a new date will be announced later. For now, neither side has any certainty about when it will actually be played.

The odd part is that the postponement didn't come out of nowhere. Barcelona had actually asked for the opposite: to move the match up to Sunday. The reason? The club had two players called up to their national teams, Jose David Contreras (Venezuela) and Tomas Rodriguez (Panama), and playing a day earlier would have allowed them to have both available. There was also another argument that matters for any club: Sunday tends to be a more convenient day to draw fans to the stadium. That request, however, was not accepted.

The Independiente del Valle factor

The other side of the coin came from Independiente del Valle. The club played its CONMEBOL Libertadores match, in which it was eliminated. That outcome, combined with the possibility that the club could have more than two players called up to their national teams, was what pushed Liga Ecuabet to move the match and avoid having it played this Monday as originally planned.

In short, two different situations pulled in opposite directions: Barcelona wanted to move the match up because of its call ups and to draw more fans, while Independiente del Valle ended up creating the scenario that led to the whole thing being pushed back. The result was that neither of the two original plans came to pass.

Now it's a matter of waiting. The rescheduled date for the clash between Barcelona and Independiente del Valle will be announced in the coming days, according to the tournament organizers themselves. In the meantime, the rest of the hexagonal groups and the four team group for the Sudamericana spot will continue on schedule, leaving this match as one of the pieces still to be slotted into the calendar.