Birds are disadvantaged by two-stream league

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A compact season of the elite league of women’s football, the Sasol Women’s League, is set to kick off on 19 March.

This was confirmed by Bluebirds Ladies Football Club head coach, Malvin Khumalo when his delegation returned from a meeting to discuss the league at the South African Football Association (Safa) headquarters at Safa House in Nasrec.

Although Safa and the sponsors, Sasol, offered no apologies for the delay in the league start, the season is expected to be compact and will again revert to the two-stream league of the past season. The aim is to wrap up all games before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in August.

If the end date is not met, Safa has instructed that league matches would have to continue as scheduled and those teams with players called up for national duty will have to make a plan by beefing up their squads.

The continuation of the two-stream league has already sent shivers down the spine of the under-resourced Birds. “We feel hard done by with the decision as we had been promised last season the reason for the two streams was simply to re-align the league and produce one national league of 16 teams, but now we’re to still play in that same format once again,” Khumalo said.

The reason why Khumalo laments the two-stream league is the fact that the majority of the giant teams of the Sasol League are based in Gauteng which falls in the stream in which the Birds ply their trade.

“We feel strongly hard done by [the decision to] revert to the two-stream league after surviving a compact and arduous league in the past season and now we have to walk that road of uncertainty again,” Khumalo said, citing the likes of Mamelodi Sundowns Ladies, Thembisa side Palace Super Falcons, Randburg’s Croesus Ladies, UJ Ladies [University of Johannesburg], the Janine van Wyk team JVW Ladies, Mabopane’s Zebra Forces and the newly-promoted Acqua Ladies from Krugersdorp.