There is no rift – Motlanthe

THE tug-of-war between the Premier Soccer League and the South African Football Association about the resumption of the Premiership and GladAfrica Championship played out in public this week as the two bodies released conflicting statements.

Soon after Safa had announced that they would only allow matches to resume in August to allow their match officials time to undergo fitness tests, the PSL released its own statement that highlighted that they were ready start this weekend.

Safa, through acting chief executive Tebogo Motlanthe, yesterday vehemently denied that there were tensions between the federation and its professional league. But he did admit that there are differing views on the approach to resuming play.

“No, that is not the case, unless you want to come to that conclusion. We’ve been working on this (plan to resume play) for three months. Every time we were called by the government or the league

(to meet), we were always available. If there was tension, we were not going to avail ourselves,” Motlanthe explained.

He said that returning to play was not only dependent on the availability of match officials.

Safa says they are now waiting for the PSL to respond to their letter following Tuesday’s Board of Governors (BOG) meeting.

“There are issues which we’ve agreed on in principle (but) that need to be tested. We cannot just rush to play if we are going to be liable for things we don’t know about. And that’s not tension. We were not going to come this far

(if there was tension),” Motlanthe insisted.

On Tuesday, the PSL sent out a statement stating that they hadn’t been allocated match officials.

Safa is in charge of that department, although it is remunerated by PSL.

Said Motlanthe: “There are just different opinions.

“The tone of that email (PSL statement) can be interpreted in different ways. It wasn’t a fighting tone.”

Safa believes that the match officials will only be ready in two weeks’ time in terms of their fitness levels.

“Remember they had their Board of Governors yesterday (Tuesday). We were expecting them to present what we sent to them and then come back to us to say whether they agree or not.

“Our suggestion of the date was based on a scientific research by the Referee’s Technical Committee. There are a lot of procedures that need to be followed with regards to the fitness of the referees, but there are also some outstanding compliance issues which the association needs to satisfy themselves with before we commit, because if you read the Gazette, it says the association will also be liable,” Motlanthe elaborated.

Asked about the compliance issues that the PSL hasn’t met, Motlanthe replied: “I can’t say what is it that they met and not. We had agreed in our meeting that our compliance officer will meet with the compliance officer of the league and they will check what needs to be done and they will report back to us because we have to write a compliance report to the government.”

In their statement, Safa also made it clear that they were not involved in the decision to hand over Gauteng as the hosts of the ‘bio-bubble’ environment.