The South African Football Association (Safa) has postponed the much-anticipated opening match of the Sasol Women’s League between Bluebirds and Mamelodi Sundowns Ladies on 3 April.
No reason was offered by Safa for the postponement but from the correspondence between the mother body and the clubs in Stream A and B of the league, Safa postponed the opening games due to slow registration of players whose deadline was 31 March.
In his correspondence, Safa’s league coordinator Kagiso Matlaopane said he had only received one registration from an unspecified team and it is believed this could be the reason why the opening matches had to be postponed in order to allow the teams enough time to register their players.
Motlaopane, who is popularly known as ‘KG’, said the opening fixtures would be postponed to 23 April and the league would now kick off with fixtures of 16 April. Birds coach Malvin Khumalo welcomed the postponement of the crucial opener as a blessing in disguise for his team.
“The opening match was a mammoth game for us and I could not risk it with eight players still unregistered because of delays in paperwork from their former teams. I have only managed to put together all the documentation now [1 April] and will rush it to Safa before the end of the day,” he said.
Among the players, Khumalo was still struggling to register ace goalkeeper Asa Rabalao, one of the new diamonds Morongwa Manamela and old hand Thabile Nene, a former Birds player who had gone to the North West University team along with Rabalao on studies.
Khumalo said Morongwa and Nene’s clearances were taking long but have since been finalised while Rabalao had been cleared with the mother body as she was due to fly out to Hungary but due to the fact that the team in Hungary was off-season, Birds thought they could play here in the meantime before her departure.
