QATAR 22: CAF Qualifiers extended to September

Agnes Nambi

CAF has announced a change in the commencement dates to Africa’s World cup qualifiers from June to September.

In a statement released this morning, CAF said that the decision was arrived at in consultation with FIFA and cited Covid 19 as the main catalyst to the games being pushed ahead.

“The CAF Emergency Committee, in consultation with FIFA, decided to postpone the CAF qualifiers for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 that were due to be played in June 2021 after taking into consideration the current challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need to ensure the optimal playing conditions for all participating teams”

the statement partly reads.

CAF went ahead to announce the proposed dates on when the rescheduled games would be played.

“The qualifiers will now take place in the existing windows of September, October and November 2021, and March 2022. CAF is reassessing its protocols and processes to enhance the implementation of COVID-related protocols, including specifically focusing on pre-match testing which had been the source of some challenges in previous windows.” the statement went ahead to elaborate.

This comes as a relief to the national team that has been under the pressure of getting it’s stadiums approved.

Lack of a national coach and the retirement of several first team key players are some of the other problems that FUFA has been grappling with and this will probably buy them some time to sort these hindrances out.

It’s also said that lack of stadiums by some countries has fuelled this move.

Another reason said to be behind this move is that some countries have been using Covid 19 as a move to suffocate the visiting countries by giving positive tests to some of the key players of the visiting team hence sitting out the match.