Referees warned
ZIFA Referees’ Committee vice-chairperson Gladmore Muzambi has vowed to flush out all incompetent match officials in 2018. He also indicated that all referees who were unduly elevated in previous years will be relegated to their appropriate classes.
Muzambi said this during a Season Opening Refresher Course at Chancellor Primary School last weekend.
The three day course attracted 67 officials and match commissioners.
Zimbabwe football has been blighted by poor officiating over the past years and in 2017 a number of games were abandoned due to poor officiating.
“We will not tolerate incompetence this season. We have some match officials who are not as good as we expected.
“The reason is that in the past two years, our referees’ development and promotion mechanism was not handled properly by the previous committee.
“This season we have decided to work on and correct that. We have some match officials who were accelerated to high levels when they do not deserve to be there, and we will take corrective action,” he said.
Muzambi said the match officials who are under qualified will be relegated.
“Those officials who were accorded unduly will be relegated to their appropriate class. We set a panel that will handle this.
“We will go through a catalogue of our referees and draw up a list of those who should be relegated.
“We are not only doing this to regions, but we did the same training for all PSL referees from February 26 to 28. We will be targeting Division two referees soon.
“This season we will have a review committee which will look into reported cases of match officials’ performances bi-monthly.
“Emphasis this year going forward will also be on quality refereeing not quantity,” said Muzambi.
Despite incompetence in the match officials, Muzambi said the standards of refereeing in the country was going up.
“Our quality has gone up over the years. Each time we have amendments, we upraise our officials on those new developments,” said Muzambi.
ZIFA Eastern Region referees committee technical instructor Phibeon Ngorima was impressed by the turnout.
“The turnout was good. We appreciate the efforts by the referees committee because this will prepare the referees and match commissioners for the forthcoming season.
“The course also helps to reduce the gap between the referees and match commissioners,” he said.