Khoza blames police for Moses Mabhida violence

Premier Soccer League chairperson Dr Irvin ‘Iron Duke’ Khoza has put law enforcement agencies on the spot for their failure to come to the party on security matters at soccer games.

Khoza was addressing a press conference at the league’s offices in Parktown following the unruly behaviour of Kaizer Chiefs fans after their team’s defeat at the hands of Free State Stars in the Nedbank Cup semi-finals at Moses Mabhida Stadium on 21 April.

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Soon after the referee blew his whistle for full time, fans started throwing missiles and invaded the pitch in their droves. They assaulted security guards, damaged broadcast equipment and set alight chairs in the stands.

“As much as every team goes into the game with the desire to win, football has its own outcomes sometimes and I would like to urge our football fans to learn to manage these outcomes,” he said.

“It’s not as if Chiefs went into the game wanting to lose, nor Stars aiming to lose too. They both wanted to win but there had to one winner and that was Free State Stars.

“Fans must learn to manage this and accept that the best team has won on the day. If they feel aggrieved, they should use the proper channels to vent their anger and frustrations through their supporters’ structures and address all their grievances to their club officials.”

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Khoza did not mince his words on the police’s failure to provide adequate security at soccer matches. “We set up a task team to deal with matters of security each time we have a soccer match and that task team involves high ranking law enforcement agencies. We assess the risk level of a particular game and endeavour to accord it the security status equaling the level of risk.

“But it is disturbing that members of the Saps always let us down. In this particular incident, the Saps members never attended the planning session of the event and no apology was sent. They only showed up in the implementation stage of the plan. How then do you implement a plan that you were not part of in the first place?”

Khoza added that the league’s private security officers were not trained in public order policing and they did not have the power of arrest.

“The best people to do that are members of the Saps public order policing. They are highly trained in crowd control and managing a situation like the one that manifested itself in Durban.”

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The KwaZulu-Natal acting police commissioner Bhekinkosi Langa said a probe had been launched into the violence at the stadium but said he was not aware of the absence of members of the police in the planning stages of the Nedbank Cup event. “Those are matters that we will have to deal with internally,” he said.