10 March 2016

Zimbabwean football in chaos

Match fixing allegations from football officials is not a real news nowadays, but in Zimbabwe you do not know who is fixing who.
Zimbabwean high officials, players, internationals are all involved in a fresh scandal of game fixing in the country. Some major tournaments are targeted, such as World Cup qualifiers, Africa's two biggest competitions (African Cup of Nation qualifiers and African Nations Championship) and even the South African league are also mentioned in the reports. Zimbabwean FA (ZIFA) executive committee member, Edzai Kasinauyo was suspended on Tuesday of suspicion 'on e-mail and audio recordings' of trying to fix the upcoming two African Nation qualifier games against Swaziland at the end of the month. Last month's African Nations Championship implicated the names of ex-national team coach Ian Gorowa, team's current assistant coach Nation Dube and ex-chief ZIFA executive Henrietta Rushwaya were all trying to fix Zimbabwean games at the competition which are under suspicion, revealed the ZIFA report. Rushwaya's life ban, from a previous match fixing scandal concerning Zimbabwe national team, was overturned in January by ZIFA's new leadership after it was never recognized by FIFA. Using her highest position at the federation, Rushwaya was accused of fixing the games of the Zimbabwean team on tours in Asia between 2007 and 2009. These scams believed to be masterminded by Singaporean well known match-fixers Wilson Raj Perumal and Dan Tan. However, ZIFA's documents revealed a large scale of match fixers including two ZIFA high officials, Rushwaya, the two coaches Gorowa and Dube, two Zimbabwean players and an unnamed Italian who was depicted as a 'ringleader'. And lastly South African's Premier League was not sparred as well. Two Zimbabwean who plays in the country, goalkeeper George Chigova and defender Partson Jaure are also named as suspects of match-fixing.
Documents also reveal that the current Zimbabwe coach Callisto Pasuwa and national goalkeeper Tatenda Mukuruva are among the whistleblowers. They were approached by the fixers and being asked to throw off the games while each player were offered 5.000 dollars (12.000 euros) for every game fixed.

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