30th January, 2013
By Adebobola Alawode
The decision of the Confederation of African, CAF to axe the Egyptian match official, Gehad Grisha, who officiated during Nigeria’s Group C game against Zambia last Friday at the Mbombela Stadium in Nelspruit, home has confirmed that some of the officials are ill-equipped for the task of officiating games at the ongoing Africa Cup of Nations holding in South Africa.
Grisha awarded a highly controversial penalty to Zambia late in the game and this did not go down well with the Nigeria Football Federation, NFF forcing the body and indeed many soccer loving Nigerians to question the credibility of the referee and it was this protest that sacked Grisha, who was the first fall guy among all the bad officials.
Some of the calls being made by these final arbiters have changed the outcome of games, tainting the glamour of the bi-annual football showpiece.
It appears that it is the Nigerian team that have been worst hit by some of the questionable calls as argued by a top Algerian journalist with Al Jazeera TV, Laraba Mourad.
Mourad threw patriotism and caution to the dog as he lambasted his compatriot, Benouza Mohammed, who presided over the game between Nigeria and Burkina Faso last Monday, for being less than fair in the handling of the game.
The sports journalist wondered why CAF should give referee Mohammed, who has a history of poor officiating and corruption in Algeria a match involving two West African countries to handle going by his antecedents in Algerian football.
According to Mourad “”When I saw him, (Mohammed) at the start of the game I knew that Nigeria was in for trouble and said what the hell is he doing here. A man who has been accused in Algeria of match-fixing and taking bribes to fix games is here to officiate in Africa’s show-piece tournament?.
Poor officiating by African referees have been identified as reason FIFA hardly invite them and the ongoing tourney in South Africa has brought to the fore the lack of professionalism on the part of some of the coaches.
Super Eagles’ coach Stephen Keshi while ruing some of the calls made by the referee said he believes the referees are bound to make some mistakes but stated that if penalty kicks must be awarded, it must be a justifiable one saying “”I don’t want to speak much about referees but we have had terrible officiating in this competition. We suffered in the first match (against Burkina Faso) with a red card and now a penalty that was not there. At this level of the game, penalty must be clear and incontestable.”
Eagles skipper Joseph Yobo appealed to the referees to be fair to the teams in the remaining matches.
“I don’t want to question the decision of the referees but I want to make a passionate appeal to the referees to be fair in their decisions, so that the best team will always win.
“It was a bizarre officiating; it was the worst penalty award I have ever seen in my entire football career. Only God knows why they are doing this to football,” Yobo said.
In some of the games played so far, the referees and their assistants have been far from perfect even as we know that they are humans and have less that 15 seconds before they take some decision, which may be either be right or wrong.
While assessing match officials of some of the games, Ivoirian Mamadou Gaye, of Supersport said he is far from being impressed either.
He took his premise from three different games saying “The penalty given against Nigeria shouldn’t have been. The Ghana goalkeeper should have been given a red card when they played Mali but the referee didn’t. Togo scored a clean goal against Ivory Coast and it was disallowed, it shows that some of the calls by the referee are killing the development of football on the continent”.
Observers are also of the view that the level of officiating is really killing the development of football in Africa.