Caf left with eggs on faces after Sundowns’ controversial win

The controversial moment in the Caf Champions League quarterfinal match between Mamelodi Sundowns and Young Africans at Loftus on Friday is still dominating headlines.

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To be honest, it doesn’t look good for the Confederation of African Football (Caf).

As far-fetched as it might seem, it’s only natural for people to start pointing fingers at who is at the helm of Caf and his past affiliation with the Brazilians. Caf president Dr Patrice Motsepe’s name was unfairly mentioned as the reason for the call referee Dahan Beida and his VAR team made.

Aziz Ki thought he had given Young Africans the lead against Sundowns on the hour mark but his venomous striker came off the crossbar and bounced back into play. That left officials with a headache of determining if the whole circumference of the ball had crossed the line or not. 

In the end, the goal wasn’t given as officials obviously felt that the ball had not crossed the line. A closer inspection will tell you that although VAR was in use for the game, the same can’t be said about goal-line technology. For me, that is where the biggest blunder was because there are two versions of the story.

Initially, one angle showed that the ball crossed the line but the second replay is not so clear. This brings into question whether it was a clear and obvious error on the part of Beida. If VAR officials felt that it was a clear and obvious error then the referee would have been encouraged to go across the monitor and check for himself. By the look of things, the VAR team didn’t feel that it was a clear and obvious error so they let him continue with play.

We can all argue until we turn blue in the face but having the aid of goal-line technology would have been the answer to this contentious moment. The electronic system would have signalled to officials within one second of the action if it was a goal or not.

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The implementation of the technology doesn’t come cheap. It’s estimated that it costs around $260,000 (over R4 million) per stadium.

If African football wants world class standards, then this is the level they have to operate at because it won’t be the last time where a decision divides the continent like this.