Football

SAFA ‘cannot accept’ FIFA re-match decision

Published

7 years ago

September 7, 2017

Olu Emmanuel

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By Ben-kalio Mercy

A senior member of the South African Football Association (SAFA) has said that it “cannot accept” the decision by football’s world governing body, Fifa, to order a re-match of a World Cup qualifier between South Africa and Senegal after officiating referee, Joseph Lamptey, was banned for life, BBC reports.

Bafana Bafana South Africa won the match last year, but the referee has been accused of “match manipulation” after wrongly awarding a penalty to South Africa. Norman Arendse, who heads Safa’s legal committee, told the BBC’s Newsday programme: “As I speak to you now Safa cannot accept it because we have got absolutely no details of the alleged match manipulation, what the nature of it was, and what it all involved. “Is he [the referee] just a corrupt individual, was he bribed by a third party outside of the match to influence the outcome of the match? We just don’t know.

“And that is the most unpalatable thing for us – to accept an outcome to which we should… have been a party, and we’ve never ever been called upon to put our side of the story in relation to the game.”