Two governing bodies of the round leather game draw my attention this week, but both get my ire for stepping into the ugly side of history – for indulging themselves in unnecessary decisions that draw controversies.
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First to come under my fearsome searchlight is the Confederation of African Football (CAF), which smeared its own already battered image on Tuesday when it announced (when almost everybody had gone to bed at night) that Senegal had been stripped of their title as 2025 Africa Cup of Nations winners!
Someone stated right off that the real reason why CAF released the information late at night was because they already knew it would be followed by fire and brimstone, flak and a wild whiplash of critical comments against them.
So, why should CAF go ahead with a decision they knew beforehand would unleash on them a can of worms and swarm of bees? The best answer to that can only be: Because top shots in the continental football body have been compromised!
That is not to suggest that money has changed hands. On the other hand, the real essence of this allegation is that CAF became more or less a toothless bulldog right from the moment they allowed Morocco become their major sponsor for various high profile events, meetings, awards, courses and competitions.
Some players of the Super Falcons insinuated as much at the beginning of this year when they realised that they would need to be in Morocco again for the third straight edition of the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON).
“Why Morocco again,” one of them asked rhetorically. “This competition is becoming boring. We need to see new places in another country. Why Morocco all the time?”
What that player didn’t state explicitly might have been, “We need to play where we will not face the same kind of intimidation that the Moroccan fans gave us during the final last year.”
An expression like that might have reminded us all how the Moroccans didn’t take kindly to losing two straight editions of WAFCON on their home soil.
Lo and behold, they put that aside and spent a lot of cash again to host the competition’s male version, yet again they could not win it! Did you expect them to be happy? Alarmingly, they also did not win the cup the first time they hosted AFCON in 1988.
Now we see why they felt so bad with how this year’s AFCON final went,to and they felt aggrieved that another hosting venture had gone awry – this time under very, very controversial circumstances. So, they apparently resorted to armtwisting tactics, first by causing so much confusion that eventually led to the postponement of this year’s WAFCON and they allegedly commenced withholding some funds that had been promised the continental body in the form of commissions.
CAF had to hurriedly find a way to compensate Morocco and appease them. Sadly, the only option open at that point in time was stripping Senegal of the AFCON title and handing it over to the aggrieved losers – CAF’s main source of continuous funding.
Someone said CAF’s appeals committee quoted relevant portions of their statutes to back their decision, which is actually true in part. But, I remember that even Satan can quote (or twist) the Bible to suit his whims and caprice when the need arises.
One snag to it, though, is that the rules mention a team that walked out of a match, but do not add what happens when the team walks back into play before the ref blows the final whistle.
As it were, in this case, the referee did not blow off the AFCON final after waiting 15 minutes for the angry team to return (though another part of the rules allows only five minutes’ wait).
In effect, Senegal’s result against Morocco should stand since they changed their mind and returned to the field before the final whistle. Though the ref erred in not blowing the whistle, the weight of that error should not be bourne by the winning team.
However, as stated at the beginning of this script, CAF compromised themselves by allowing Morocco have a strong hand in so many funding issues affecting events and competitions on the continent; such that the moguls needed to act fast in order to avoid losing the fowl that’s laying the golden egg.
On the other hand, Nigeria’s football egg heads are still showing how naive they are when it comes to politics of the game. They raised our hopes of getting a FIFA World Cup ticket ‘through the backdoor’ by telling us about a protest they lodged against DR Congo … but they forgot to follow it up with due process.
Of what good is going public with such sensitive information when your protest was delivered well out of the stipulated time (almost two weeks late instead of under 24 hours of the incident) and you then submit it without the essential protest fee? Even a club at the grassroots wouldn’t make such a flimsy procedural error.
Dramatically, despite their ignominious flaw, Lords of The Football House in Abuja still have the gumption to tell us that they are ‘already preparing an appeal.’ What effrontery. As if one late protest is not enough, we are ‘still preparing’ to lodge an appeal – instead of saying it’s already been delivered!!
Well, well, well. Which one is better? A compromised continental body or a naive national federation? Let’s check all globally accepted codes of integrity for the answer.
