Montevideo, Nov 15 (IANS) Uruguay’s Edinson Cavani and Chile’s Gonzalo Jara will face each other in the fourth match of the 2018 FIFA World Cup South America football qualifiers on Tuesday for the first time since their spat earlier in the year.
Cavani and Jara were involved in one of the most memorable football controversies in the Copa America tournament held in July 2015 in Chile. The hosts went on to win the match, reports Xinhua.
The Chilean defender touched his opponents’ bottom during the match which irritated the Uruguayan striker and led him to hit Jara. Paris Saint-German forward Cavani was sent off for his act of violence.
The embarrassing incident which spread all over the world happened during the second half of the quarter-final match.
Jara, who plays for German club Mainz, then became a hero among the Chileans while the Uruguayans considered his conduct to have been unsportsmanlike.
The Chilean was punished and had to miss the last two matches of the Copa America while Cavani was also suspended for two matches and returned to the national team on Thursday by scoring a goal against Ecuador in the third match of the South America Qualifiers.
Both Cavani and Jara have said that the incident will remain in the past and that they are bored of answering questions on the subject.
Cavani clarified that “with Jara everything is fine” and he remembered that he himself has made many mistakes and for that reason “the past is in the past.”
“What happened with Jara has already passed. It is old news. Soccer is temporal and nothing more can be gained from this situation,” said Cavani.
Jara said that the incident is “a closed topic, beyond the concern of the public, people, journalists and television.”
The upcoming match between Uruguay and Chile will take place at the Centenario Stadium here.
The 51,200 tickets available for the match have already been sold out for several days according to local media.
