Pakistan women’s football team is likely to take part in the upcoming South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) Women’s Championship after lifting of FIFA’s ban on Pakistan.
The SAFF Women’s Championship is scheduled to commence on 29 August in Nepal with 5 teams including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and the Maldives already slated to take part in it. Afghanistan are unlikely to feature in the tournament while Pakistan’s participation in the tournament is subject to SAFF’s approval.
According to the details, SAFF has asked the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) to send in the entry form after which the SAFF committee will consider their participation in the tournament.
PFF’s Normalization Committee member, Shahid Khokar, revealed that there is a strong possibility that the national team will take part in the competition as there have been fruitful talks with SAFF general secretary, Anwarul Haque Helal.
The national women’s team faces an uphill task with just under two months left for the competition. They last played an international match back in 2015.
PFF will have to act quickly in order to get the national women’s team back up to speed. With the team out of action for so long, new players will have to be identified and several appointments including filling the vacant head coach seat will have to be made to send the team.
Via Dawn
The hyper-feminist façade is not going to work. The task given to this body was to conduct elections, not concoct football scorecards in all-female tournaments. 30 goals per game are artificial results that we can do without, just like their artificial intelligence that seems to be dumbing them down even more, collectively. Conduct the PFF elections. And get your people to either head on back home, or start fresh from the grassroots with one football club, like everyone else. There are 2,500 registered clubs and 1,500 of them have voting rights. Just because democracy at home isn’t working out too well for them because of their Supreme Court, doesn’t mean they can take it out on our football of all things. The damage they’ve already caused by awarding themselves hosting rights and losing the Russian market, sponsorships like Gazprom and billionaires is bad enough already. Don’t make it worse. You can’t buy out an entire sport in Pakistan by buying up a handful of people at the PFF. Cricket was different because half of our revenue comes indirectly from India since 90% of the market is Indian. They’ve been our arch-enemies so that makes our cricket even more vulnerable. And what’s worse is that less than a dozen countries play the sport. If they think going the Punjabi route will be easy for them in football, someone remind them how much they already had to work for a sport they don’t play that well and consequently, never won a single World Cup. Even when they control FIFA like it’s the IMF. They have already started to feel the burden trying to manipulate football like cricket in Pakistan. They had to get nothing teams to qualify after decades and even grant them the right to host World Cup matches. What an absolute comedy of errors, one after the other. All for what? just to perpetuate the shenanigans of a group of misfits? By now, we hope they already understand that one or two meetings in Lahore won’t cut it. It’s not like the PCB. The PFF HQ is in Lahore but the sport is in every nook and corner. Some places they issue internal travel warnings for. Stop wasting everyone’s time, folks. The world has changed. And it’s been a while since it has. You’re only waking up to it, now. Get with the times. Even the Sri Lankans won’t let you have your way with them. Let’s move forward in a more mutually beneficial manner. We can help them replace the Russian market if they help us replace their turds, both behind the screens and the ones being shoved in our faces everyday. More amenable and respectable people will do, provided that we can all mutually agree on their appointments. A democratically-elected board is the only solution. We need the league to go on by next month, at the latest. Any typical American stubbornness with respect to selecting individuals in the board or players in different teams will be pointless and would waste everyone’s time.