AfricaPress-Tanzania: THE Tanzania Premier League Board (TPLB) has notified clubs to make good preparations and be ready for the top flight league which officially resumes on February 13th this year.
The league was temporarily suspended to pave way for the Mapinduzi Cup tournament in Zanzibar and the ongoing Africa Nations Championship (CHAN) finals in Cameroon.
According to the statement issued on Thursday by TPLB and signed by the board’s Media and Communications Officer Karim Boimanda, fixtures for the clubs which have games in hand will begin on February 4th.
“League games which were postponed due to some players competing in CAF organised competitions will commence from February 4th before normal proceedings of the 19th round of the league on February 13th,” reads part of the statement.
It therefore wished all teams good preparations prior to their games to wind up the season. Recently, TPLB Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Almas Kasongo named financial constraints as one of the big challenges they faced last year in running leagues as he gave a brief analysis of how the leagues have been managed until this far and a way forward this year.
“Financial problems have been experienced by both the league and contesting clubs in general. As the board, we have three official sponsors who support our day to day requirements on how to smoothly run the leagues. “But at the same time, you can see that there are few clubs with their own reliable sponsors as such, the ratio of income generation differs from expenditure bearing in mind that such clubs spend more than what they get,” noted Kasongo.
He continued: “This is why we are pushing for club licensing so that clubs should be able to spend basing on what they produce and if this will be achieved, then the problems of seeing teams spending much than what they make will be addressed.”
He therefore hoped that this year, more sponsors will come aboard to render the necessary support needed to properly manage football while urging clubs to be on the forefront in searching for their own potential financiers.
Queried to give his assessment on the part of referees which has been the mostly criticised area as far as the country’s football is concerned, Kasongo replied that until technology advancement is embraced, the errors of referees will be minimised.
“You can see that our colleagues in developed countries have moved away from the stage of 100 per cent depending on referees by creating a Video Assistant Referee (VAR) which is helping them a lot to give clear and fair judgement. “Recently, I was going through a research conducted in the English Premier League (EPL) which showed that in every EPL match, there are five human errors done by referees but they have excelled to solve such challenges due to the availability of VAR,” disclosed Kasongo.
According to him, the main setback when it comes to refereeing in the country is lack of helpful technology like VAR and goal line technology of which he described as a healing dose for human errors conducted by referees during matches.
“I believe that our referees try their best to control well the game by following the set-up 17 guidelines in football but with the lack of technology, their human errors will continue to be seen until we embrace VAR,” he said.
