Another 'blameless' blunder

2007-03-19 13:29

George Dearnaley

Oh dear.

The South African Football Association is in the news again - once again making international news for all the wrong reasons.

Two very high profile blunders have been used by the international media to highlight our countries' apparent incompetence at running the 2010 World Cup.

Why blame the whole country? It's only a small group of individuals who insist on doing very basic things badly. Mind you, it is the small group who are tasked with running our football association on a day-to-day basis.

The first calamity was in not arranging for the various work permits for our high-profile foreign coach.

The subsequent media coverage and the 'threat' of Carlos Alberto Parreira ending up behind bars for working illegally had our foreign detractors rolling in the aisles.

Safa CEO Raymond Hack was blamed by all and sundry, although I felt this was a bit harsh.

Fiasco

Surely you don't expect the CEO of a big company to do all the paperwork when you hire an employee? This should have been done by someone in admin tasked with making sure all the paperwork was in order. It can't be that hard!

But apparently it is...

The second fiasco concerns the international call-up of Germany-based defender Bradley Carnell even though he is banned for the match.

It takes a lot of organising to get an international player out for a match.

There's all the co-ordinating of flights and accommodation, and phoning the player's club and his agent and... well maybe it's just five or six phone calls.

There is however the tricky part of making sure he is not injured - or banned.

Eligibility

The injured part can be tricky - he might be faking an injury, his club might say he is injured because they don't want him getting injured on international duty, he might be injured but wants to play - endless permutations in this department.

The 'eligibility department however seems more straightforward.

The player received a red card in a match and is banned or he has received a certain number of yellow cards and he is banned, or he is not banned.

I guess some sort of Excel spreadsheet would do the trick

But apparently no-one at Safa has discovered this useful administration tool.

Carnell was called up, announced in the squad to the media and preparing for an away trip to Chad. Luckily the media are members of the 'wide-awake' club and pointed this out to Safa.

Idiocy

Their response was that they would 'investigate' how this happened.

But I bet no-one will be held responsible for this basic admin idiocy; as no-one was held responsible for the work permits; as no-one was held responsible for the Mandela challenge match balls-up against Egypt in the London.

No-one is accountable.

You can make all the mistakes in the world, so long as you don't admit to them.

Who cares if you are dragging the rest of the entire nation down with you!

George is the publisher of Kick Off soccer magazine and represented South Africa during the 1994 World Cup qualifiers.

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