CAF RED CARDS WESLIANS, BLACK SWALLOWS

MBABANE – The cat is finally out of the bag – hub giants Manzini Wanderers and Pigg’s Peak Black Swallows are the clubs with registration challenges.

These are Premier League of Eswatini (PLE) affiliate teams, who by close of business yesterday, were still battling to meet the required CAF club licensing standards.  This means only 14 teams of the 16 comply and are ready to play this weekend. 

CAF is an acronym for Confederation of African Football and also gets instructions from the world football mother body, FIFA (Federation of International Football Associations). As exclusively reported by our weekly publication, the Times Sunday of last Sunday, only 88 per cent of the 16 teams complied with required standards and are ready for registration to resume the season this Saturday.

covering

In essence, 14 teams are ready to play despite that the PLE released a fixture covering all 16 teams and at the time, the latter had claimed to have no idea who, among their members, did not make the cut in the licensing. The PLE had confirmed that the Eswatini Football Association (EFA) gave them correspondence confirming not all their members conformed to the licensing reality, that is the only licence to registration and COVID-19 relief funds from the EFA. An impeccable source has said that the non-compliant two teams were the aforementioned.

crucial

“Wanderers have challenges with their financials as we all know they couldn’t even pay their players, which is very crucial with CAF and they do not have a training ground while Black Swallows have no office,” said a source.

Wanderers’ PRO Mlungisi Ndzinisa did not deny that they did not comply with the licensing standards. However, he explained that they would meet the grade. 

confident

“We have submitted the things that were short and are confident we comply with the licensing standards. We had an issue with our training ground but that was resolved along with our finances which were done by professionals,” Ndzinisa explained. He said they would be waiting for the official response from the EFA otherwise they submitted the missing requirements, which also included medicals for some of their players. PLE Chief Operations Officer (COO) Pat Vilakati had confirmed the 88 per cent compliance but said they did not know the complying and non-complying teams.

emerged

Efforts to get a comment from him again yesterday proved futile as his cellphone rang unanswered when sought. It later emerged that he was locked in a meeting with the EFA over the start of the weekend league games. Black Swallows’ Director Charles Matsebula politely requested not to comment on the issue when sought yesterday.

Continues on page 47

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: