Namibians to act after hotel incident
Namibians to act after hotel incident
Posted: 2008-07-31 09:37
The Namibia Football Association will take steps against three unnamed Brave Warriors players after they apparently sprayed powder from a fire extinguisher onto a large section of a Witbank hotel carpet in South Africa last weekend.
The incident took place on Saturday night when Namibia bowed out of the Cosafa Senior Challenge Cup with a 1-0 loss to a South African development side.
According to the Namibian in Windhoek, the NFA on Tuesday issued a media statement dismissing the incident as an accident, and slamming the Namibian and South African media for reporting on it.
An unsigned statement issued by NFA spokesperson Beau Kauta said “the players were playing with the fire extinguisher of the hotel, but not with the intention to do any damage to property.”
He said the fire extinguisher accidentally went off and the powder was sprayed onto the carpets in the hotel corridor.
Kauta said the Brave Warriors team manager, Tim Isaacs, the duty manager of the hotel and a representative from Cosafa assessed the situation and decided that the players should clean up the mess.
He said allegations that players were drunk and damaged mirrors and other hotel equipment were not true.
“It was not the first time that players were travelling or staying in hotels.
“They are exposed to these facilities and what happened in South Africa was nothing significant that justified the exaggeration as reported in local and South African media,” said Kauta.
Kauta further said that the NFA was surprised by Namibian reporters “who wrote stories about the performance of the team by calling the team manager for results, but they deemed it inappropriate to call him when they saw the story reported by KickOff.com to confirm or get his side of the story.”
When asked what type of punishment the involved players would get, Kauta said it would be according to the rules in the code of conduct of the NFA and the Namibia Sports Commission (NSC).
He said the team did not have any intention to destroy the good name of the country.
“We apologise on behalf of the Brave Warriors, technical team as well as the NFA family and the Namibian nation for the inconvenience this incident may have caused,” said Kauta.
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