Johannesburg- Orlando Pirates rising star Goodman Mosele is facing a two-match ban after going AWOL and not showing up in the Bafana Bafana camp after he was called up for national duty.
The South African Football Association (Safa) said it will deal with the matter on the team’s return from Ethiopia.
The twinkle-toed midfielder was in Bafana head coach Hugo Broos’ list for the back-to-back 2022 Fifa World Cup qualifiers against Ethiopia, but the former Baroka FC player did not arrive in camp, and no explanation or valid reason came to the fore.
Not even his club Pirates knew his whereabouts and this left Broos livid and frustrated at a media conference on Monday.
Mosele was replaced by SuperSport United midfielder Jesse Donn in the squad.
The federation, in line with Fifa rules with regards to national team call-ups, has the right to bar a player from playing for his club if he fails to honour a national call-up without a valid reason.
Said Safa CEO Tebogo Motlanthe: “We are going to write a letter to the PSL and his club to inform them that we are going to invoke the clause that says if a player does not report for national team duty, as Safa we can ban him for two matches.
No one knows where the player is and there has been no communication. So, we will exercise what the Fifa rules say in this regard.”
Approached to give his side of the story, Mosele said that he was “okay” but he was not ready to talk about this issue, before hanging up the phone.
Pirates’ high-ranking official Floyd Mbele also declined to comment. “I am not going to say anything for now. I am doing this out of respect for a number of stakeholders. I would rather not comment and when the time is right, we will talk about it.”
In recent weeks, Pirates have been hit by a series of ill-disciplined players and there are worries that the Buccaneers ship is lacking strong leadership in terms of disciplining players.
Striker Gabadinho Mhango was in the news after it was reported that he was allegedly involved in an incident with local 20-year-old porn actress Wandi Ndlovu, way after the Covid-19 curfew, after grooving at Propaganda Club in Tshwane.
Midfielder Ben Motshwari was suspended by the club after being charged by police for assault.
Mbele dismissed the notion that they have disciplinary issues at the club. “All these matters are receiving attention. It’s just a cruel fate that they are all happening at the same time.
“I do not want to believe there’s an ill discipline at Pirates. People deal with matters with alarm and noise, our posture is different in the sense that we want to find out the root cause, it’s important to understand the cause and not make noise. At the moment, we have not found anything untoward,” Mbele said.
News doing the rounds is that Mosele, 21, is suffering from anxiety and is low on confidence when it comes to playing for Bafana.
Other reports are that he needed to do a traditional ceremony at his rural home before he could travel out of the country to Ethiopia.
In 2009, Free State Stars red-hot striker Sthembiso Ngcobo declined a Bafana call-up and told his coach Steve Komphela that he was afraid of playing for the SA national team. As a result, he missed out on the 2009 Fifa Confederations Cup and the 2010 World Cup.
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