OPINION: Roll up, roll up for another PSL circus act!
Are the PSL play-offs starting on Thursday? Right now, your guess is as good as mine.
Royal AM players celebrate promotion. But will they be promoted? Picture: Steve Haag/BackpagePix
Another season, another courtroom drama. But we are not talking about the latest Netflix series here, no this is the Premier Soccer League (PSL), a supposedly professionally run organisation that increasingly resembles a joke shop full of party clowns.
ALSO READ: Royal AM call PSL in contempt of court for continuing play-offs
Almost every campaign there seems to be a poorly-handled situation that ends up in arbitration, with regard to promotion from the GladAfrica Championship, or relegation from the DStv Premiership.
In 2018, it was Ajax Cape Town who went to court after they were docked points over the Tendai Ndoro saga that saw them relegated from the Premiership. In 2019, there was a squabble involving TTM and Ajax Cape Town over who should end up in the play-offs.
And now, this season, there is a situation where the playoffs have been cast into doubt at the time of writing, as Royal AM, who finished the season in first or second in the GladAfrica Championship, depending on who you want to believe, have got themselves an interdict from a supreme court judge to get the playoffs postponed.
The PSL. were supposedly in court on Thursday morning trying to get the interdict overturned, so that the first play-off match between Chippa United and Richards Bay can take place on Thursday afternoon. Royal AM, however, say they have case in court on Friday, where they hope to get Sekhukhune’s three points previously given to them in court now taken away from them, points that put Sekhukhune above Royal AM in the Championship.
The whole saga is a diabolical mess, that speaks more of the league’s inability to run a proverbial piss-up in a brewery, than it does of an ability to run a professional football league.
Part of the problem is the speed of procedure, with cases taking an eternity to get concluded, which means there is this mad rush at the end of the campaign. For example, the game Sekhukhune played against Polokwane City, in which City were found to have broken the rules, in not fielding five Under-23 players, was on January 2, over five months ago, but here we are, still in a courtroom, debating three points.
A faster system needs to be devised, not to mention that protocol should be put in place so that teams simply aren’t allowed to run out onto a pitch with sides that break a league’s rules. The PSL has managed to get the last two season’s done and dusted in the DStv Premiership and, sort of, in the GladAfrica Championship under duress, in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is commendable, though they have also been ruthless on service providers outside of their sponsors, not allowing, for example, independent media into any of their matches, a total disgrace that has not yet been properly explained.
There has not been a permanent Chief Executive Officer at the PSL for some time, with Mato Madlala continuing to act in the role, and not do anything discernible. Meanwhile top media officer Lux September left for the Confederation of African Football this season. When Royal AM got their interdict, the PSL said absolutely nothing – Royal AM’s scheduled playoff game on Tuesday just didn’t happen.
It is reasonable to say the PSL is deteriorating in terms of its administration, and that this latest courtroom drama is another example of such. To return to a Netflix analogy, this isn’t even close to being in the top 100 courtroom dramas, it’s more of a badly-dubbed, low-budget shambles.
