The four friendlies South Africa played in May 2010 (4 - 0 vs. Thailand, 1 - 1 vs. Bulgaria, 2 - 1 vs. Colombia and 5 - 0 vs. Guatemala) are under suspicion.
The referees for these four matches were brought by Football4U, controlled by Wilson Raj Perumal - now in a Finnish prison for match-fixing. Quite a storm happening now. See more on FIFA.com.
While I'm all against match fixing, the South African press are asking the wrong question:
What role did the now suspicious Bafana matches of early 2010 play in the team's rise in the Fifa rankings? See more on SportLive.
Only the match against Thailand was included in the May 2010 ranking calculation that saw South Africa climb 7 places to 83rd.
Perumal has almost done his time in finnish jail, next they give him up to Hungary police, an other case there.
ReplyDeleteThe 10:0 win of Bahrain against Indonesia in the WC-qualifier will also be examined:
ReplyDelete“Given the unusual outcome in relation to the results-expectation and head-to-head history, and in the interests of maintaining unequivocal confidence in our game, FIFA Security will conduct a routine examination of the Bahrain vs. Indonesia game and its result.”
(http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/preliminaries/news/newsid=1591826/index.html)
...although I could imagine that the actual reason was that until the 86th minute (when Qatar scored the 2-2), it was exactly the result which Bahrain needed in order to overtake Qatar, as the combined margin of Qatar's loss and Bahrain's win had to be bigger than 9 goals…
Interesting to see the outcome of this examination.
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