MALAWI ROBBED IN BROAD-DAY LIGHT

Long-serving Cosafa Secretary-General Ashford Mamelodi has stepped down.
The Botswana-born football administrator has served the council for almost a decade and will now concentrate on a job within FIFA as a Development Officer. Mamelodi will be replaced by Chief Operating Officer Susan Destombes. She will be based in Johannesburg.

Newly Elected COSAFA Executive Committee

Walter “Nyamilandu” Manda (Malawi)
Faizel Sidat (Mozambique)
John Muinjo (Namibia)
Timothy Shongwe (Swaziland)
Wellington Nyatanga (Zimbabwe)

Back to Mamelodi. He personally presided over the theft (allegedly and reportedly) of Malawi’s chances on two occasions:

COSAFA Senior cup: Malawi was ranked higher than Botswana and he corruptly seeded Botswana forcing Malawi to go through expensive preliminaries.

Cosafa Under 20 tournament last week: Malawi’s Junior Flames finished ahead of Zimbabwe with a superior goal difference and should have gone on to face South Africa’s Amajita: He somehow forced the issue to be decided by drawing of lots. Zimbabwe won the drawing of lots (I wonder if there was even a Malawi representative during the drawing of lots) and went on to face SA in the Semis. Ironically, in last year’s finals Zimbabwe beat South Africa. It “seems” the organizers wanted the semis to be a repeat of last year’s final between South Africa and Zimbabwe. If you read my post titled SOCCER AND COIN TOSSING, I based my post on standings reported on kickoff.com (South African). I have just found out that the standings were incorrect.

Here are the results for the Zimbabwe/Malawi Group:

Malawi 5 Mauritius 0
Malawi 3 Botswana 2
Malawi 0 Zimbabwe 0
Zimbabwe 3 Botswana 2
Zimbabwe 2 – Mauritius 1
Botswana 2 – Mauritius 1

Both Malawi and Zimbabwe had 7 points but Malawi scored more goals than Zimbabwe and also conceded less goals than Zimbabwe.

Was it a deliberate mistake by kickoff.com? Part of the conspiracy? “Surprisingly”, the COSAFA website is yet to publish the final Group Standings.

In a meeting held on 5 December 2008, in Kimberley, COSAFA made further progress with regard to the restructuring of its Executive Committee, based on decisions taken during a COSAFSA retreat in June 2007.

According to the December 9, 2008 Malawi Daily Times, during the assembly, COSAFA President Suket Patel took responsibility of the error (robbing Malawi) and apologized to Football Association of Malawi for the error. End of Story?

Apology is not enough. South Africa are the “champs” after beating Zimbabwe in the Semis and Mozambique in the finals. If Malawi faced South Africa in the Semis nobody knows who would have won. So, COSAFA should invalidate the championship. If they were able to draw lots to break the “tie” between Zimbabwe and Malawi then they can also draw lots to see who should have gone to the finals between Malawi and South Africa. If the drawing of lots is in favour of South Africa then they remain champs. If the drawing of lots is in favour of Malawi then there needs to be another drawing of lots between Malawi Junior Flames and Mozambique Junior Mambas to decide the Champs.

FIFA where are you? Sometimes FIFA has to intervene without receiving a formal complaint. What’s the point of filing a formal complaint when you know that all FIFA will say is: “We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again”