Afcon final madness

Its not about proving you didn't break the rules. That is never what they do in these situations.

Its about proving the disciplinary process was flawed.

My money is on this being overturned at some point.

Whole thing is a farce, nobody comes out of it looking in any way good.

just read the Moroccan and the ball boys who had all got fined for wrestling with the Senagalese back-up goalkeeper who was trying to protect Mendy's towels and stop Moroccan time wasting all had their fines reduced.

That certainly reeks of brown envelope business.

You are confusing Match rules and Tournament rules. They were punished for breaching tournament rules.

I was just repeating what a pundit had said. Perhaps he is wrong, but I can still see the room for doubt there.

• Tournament rules say the penalty for leaving the field unauthorized is a forfeit of the game.
• So, by tournament rules the referee should have applied a forfeit and awarded the game to Morocco.
• But, the referee did not apply that rule, he did not follow rule 82, instead he continued the match.
• And since the refs decision is final, he had the power to do that and so his decision should be followed.

This isn't something I care much about but I can see the logical chain there. I can certainly see why this will be appealed, I know I would be arguing the case strongly in Senegals shoes.

As an aside, I hope Senegal do lose. AFCON is considered a 2nd tier competition because of crap like they pulled.

But this tournament rule does require the referee to apply it. The ref is no bystander for this one, he needs to decide if the team left the ground unauthorised or not. Leaving the ground unauthorised means game abandonment.

And in this case, he decided to restart the game. He clearly did not consider the game to have been abandoned. And if the ref did not consider the game to have been abandoned, and the refs decision is final, then do the federation even have a rule breach that needs to be sanctioned?

My only real point here is that this is not necessarily an open and shut case, there is something there for a blood sucking lawyer to build a case on. Like regulation 23.10 for example

23.10 But once the match is started, it is exclusively the
prerogative of the referee to decide of the suspension or the total stop of the match
for any of the reasons stipulated in Law 5 of the laws of the game

Law 5 does have mention of abandonment and specifically restart after abandonment, so does 23.10 of the CAF regulations imply that law 5 of the FIFA laws takes precedence over CAF regulation 82?

I don't know, but somebody will probably have fun finding out.

Feels like it needs a GAA solution!

i.e. not in the rule book, but the fairest outcome.

Senegal have to be punished, but just awarding Morocco the cup is relatively meaningless. So the answer is a replay, in Morocco, but the 10 players who were playing for Senegal at the time and left the field (i.e. all but Mane) are banned and the manager is banned.

So if Morocco win they get to do it on the pitch, celebrate in front of their fans, and it's meaningful. If they can't beat a weakened Senegal team, then so be it, they don't deserve it. Finding a date in the calendar wouldn't be easy, but not impossible either.