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By Mohamed Assed.
Tripoli, 2 February 2013:
There has been confusion . . .[restrict]about whether or not Libya is able to host 2013 Confederation of African Football (CAF) games, following conflicting reports.
On Tuesday, according to Libyan news agency LANA, the Egypt-based CAF said that Libya was not eligible to host football matches for this year’s CAF Champions League and CAF Confederations Cup because it could not guarantee the safety of players or supporters. The decision was an official response to a request by the Libyan Football Federation (LFF) to host both friendly and official football matches in the country during 2013.
This seemed to contradict the CAF’s preliminary security assessment last year.
Then on Wednesday, Solidarity Press quoted the deputy president of the Libyan Etihad Football Club, Abdul-Fattah Ghaffar saying that CAF would be sending three committee members to evaluate the security situation before making a decision about whether or not Tripoli’s Al-Ittihad and Benghazi’s Al-Nasr CAF matches could be played on home turf.
Both teams are playing matches in CAF tournaments this year.
It transpires that the three-man delegation led by Sudanese lawyer and member of CAF’s executive board, Majdy Shams Edeen, is not coming to Tripoli to re-assess whether the two teams can play their CAF matches at home this year. It is coming to decide whether security conditions will permit other CAF matches to be held in the country following the Champions League and Confederation Cup matches .
The LFF, meanwhile, has been facing problems of its own, which apparently include administrative and structural issues, and it has so far been unable to kick-start the Libyan football league. It has been suggested that the chaotic nature of the LFF’s administration was one of the reasons why Alain Giresse recently refused to take the job of head coach for the Libyan football team. [/restrict]
