Johannesburg – South African Football Association (SAFA) president Danny Jordan unpacked the way forward surrounding their appeal to Fifa over the referee’s penalty decision in a 2022 World Cup qualifier match between Bafana Bafana and Ghana.
Bafana failed to qualify to the next round of the qualifiers after going down to a 1-0 loss to Ghana at the Cape Coast Stadium last week Thursday.
Speaking during the briefing held in Safa’s headquarters, Jordan said that the matter has been brought to the attention of Fifa, which is currently assessing the appeal.
He said that, the football federation is deeply concerned with how the match official failed to follow principle rules of the game, as he wrongfully gave away a penalty to Ghana.
This penalty helped the Black Stars to qualify to the next round of the qualifiers.
“We are here to unfold events that shocked us. We were robbed in this game, and as a result we launched an appeal with Fifa,” said Jordan.
“We as the Safa we firstly analysed and exposed all bias and misconducts in this match, and report to Fifa the match manipulation for unlawful ruling,” he added.
In their research, Safa conducted an investigation and discovered there was a betting spike, which entailed that the penalty will be given at the exact time where the referee made a ruling.
Jordan said this is a substantial evidence that a penalty giveaway was on the cards from the word go, before even the match started.
Moreover, Jordan says that there was an immense pressure that, if Ghana lose the game there was going to be a disorder.
Jordan said that during their assessment, the federation called on former referee Ace Ngcobo to give an update on what transpired in the match against Ghana.
“We then asked Mr Ngcobo to analyse the match manipulation and to see if there’s pattern that we can show that there could have been a tangible evidence that there was a foul play.
“In his review he discovered that there was no need to for the Senegalese referee Maguette Ndiaye to give Ghana a penalty kick,” added Jordan.
“Fact of the matter is that we have to respect the outcome from the football rules,” said Jordan.
He added: “We furthermore asked Fifa to give us a permission to have the match be replayed once the outcome comes in our favour.”
“But at this stage we are leaving the matter to Fifa’s hands to make a final decision, as they have the sports reader that reports to sports betting readers.
“This was not in line with the laws of the game, this was a deliberate duty of the match official to make a clear ruling but he decided to neglect and gave away a penalty,” said Jordan.
Adding his word in the briefing, Bafana coach Hugo Broos said: “We were weak in the game, now things got nasty when Ghana was given a penalty, things went south, we hope Fifa reviews this matter.”
Meanwhile, Jordan gave credit to Broos and his assistant Helman Mkhalele for bringing fighting spirit at Bafana.
“They have done exceptionally well in boosting Bafana players confidence, the lads performed well in their previous games since Broos and Mkhalele took the baton.
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