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| Tired Soccer Player |
Take a look at the 16-team Absa premiership table and the sight of the bloody thing is deflating, to say the least.
Log leaders SuperSport United have played six games since August while second-placed Mamelodi Sundowns have only managed five matches during the same period.
Bidvest Wits, Free State Stars and Ajax Cape Town have also managed five matches while Orlando Pirates have only played two league matches since August.
We are in the midst of another stop as the last league match was a midweek encounter between Black Aces and Bloemfontein Celtic on September 25. Things will not get better any time soon because most clubs will not play another league match until October 22.
What in the world … a full month between league matches?
Surely this is not the norm in other parts of the world!
How do you expect the fans to remain interested in the league campaign when the excitement is allowed to fizzle out because of these ridiculously long breaks?
Small wonder then that one exasperated fan took his dissatisfaction to Twitter the other day and said he regards the past two months of the premiership campaign as nothing more than pre-season.
And quite frankly, no one can blame the man.
Most of the fixture chaos has been caused by Pirates’ participation in the African Champions League, and while they have played only two league matches this season, they have actually played more matches than any other side in South Africa.
Coach Roger de Sa has already admitted fatigue is setting in. Given their schedule over the past few weeks, it was only a matter of time.
Saturday’s African Champions League showdown at Orlando Stadium against Tunisian powerhouses Esperance will be their seventh match on the continent since July.
And reaching the final of the MTN8 at the weekend — where they were beaten 3-1 on penalties by Platinum Stars — was also always going to take its toll.
The above challenges make a strong case for the PSL to speed up the process of changing the Absa premiership calendar and allowing it to run from February to November to avoid these fixture congestion problems.
Since the domestic premiership season is modelled on the European calendar and runs from August to May of the following year, fixture congestion has been an inevitable reality for domestic football for many moons because the Confederation of African Football (Caf) operates from February to November.
It boggles the mind that it’s taken this long to take this matter seriously because the domestic game has had to continue paying the price.
Former PSL CEO Stan Matthews said last year that plans were afoot to change South Africa’s football season to align it with the continental calendar by 2014.
"In principle, the executive have agreed to switching the season to a calendar year, to be in line with the rest of Africa," Matthews said at the time.
He said that while the PSL planned to implement the change from 2014, working out the finer details was proving rather tricky and implementation would be no walk in the park.
At the rate things are going, they will need to get a move on and fast. Those finer details need to be finalised urgently because, quite frankly, Rome is burning.
Kaizer Chiefs are supposed to play in the Champions League in February and I imagine the very thought of juggling domestic assignments with continental challenges is already giving club boss Kaizer Motaung multiple bouts of insomnia.
The cost to the domestic game is immense and, besides the obvious effect this whole mess has on the PSL itself, the national team is also feeling the effects of all this.
Source : BDlive.co.za
Tags : PSL, Safa ,fixtures, clubs, Sundowns, Supersport United,
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