Football: 2016 Cosafa Under-17 Championship |22 July 2016

Sudden rule change forces SFF to send bigger team to Mauritius

A sudden rule change forced theSeychelles Football Federation to send two sets of players to Mauritius for the Council of Southern Africa Football Association (Cosafa) Under-17 Championship.

Contacted yesterday by Sports Nation, Seychelles Football Federation (SFF) chairman Elvis Chetty explained why the federation sent two sets of players to Mauritius where the Seychelles selection are expected to compete in the Cosafa Under-17 Championship which begins today.

“What happened is that Cosafa decided to make a change to the year players need to have been born to compete in tournament,” said Mr Chetty.

He added: “As we had a group players who had been training since the start of the year for the competition, we could not just tell them not to go now as that would have discouraged them. So, we decided to take them to Mauritius where they will compete in a few friendly games and then we called up a group of players who would be eligible to play, to join those already eligible from the first selection for the tournament.”

Mr Chetty pointed out that the previous rules stated that the players need to be born as from 1999 and onwards to be eligible to play in the tournament, which would have meant that the same team who recently played against Tanzania in the U-17 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers would have been representing Seychelles. But, on July 1, 2016 that was changed to players born after the year 2000, meaning a number of players were automatically deemed unavailable due to their year of birth.

“The federation felt that as the players had been preparing all year and had been looking forward to the tournament, not allowing them to go now would just discourage them, which would be bad for Seychelles football,” explained Mr Chetty.

He also expressed his disappoint that the players were registered for the tournament since April and felt that Cosafa could have informed them of the issue earlier so that they would have brought in a new group of players.

There is now a total of 36 players in Mauritius, with one group of 19 players competing at the tournament which begins today with Seychelles’ first game against South Africa.

The other group of players will compete in a few friendly matches to gain much-needed international experience while they also lend their support to those competing in the Cosafa under-17 championship.

Seychelles have been drawn in group A alongside former winners South Africa, Namibia and hosts Mauritius. Holders Zambia are in group B with Malawi, Madagascar and Mozambique.

The top two nations in each group advance to the cross knockout semifinals where the top team in group A play the group B runners-up and the group B winners play the second-placed side from group A.

The tournament will be played at two venues in Mauritius – the George V Stadium in Curepipe and St. François Xavier Stadium in the capital Port Louis.

The last Cosafa Under-17 Championship was played in Zimbabwe in 2014 as part of the AUSC Region 5 Under-20 Youth Games and saw Zambia defeat the hosts 3-0 in the final. Namibia were ranked third after defeating Malawi 2-1.

S. N.