Fact is:
■ ABDULAHI SHEHU got yellow card right from first match (preliminary rounds) of the qualifiers against Swaziland in Swaziland.
■ When the draws for group stage were made the technical staff assumed the cards from preliminaries would not count going forward and didn’t take proper records. Indeed throughout the qualifying series Adullahi Shehu has never been counted as on yellow even by the match documents such as when we played Cameroon Mikel, Moses and Balogoon were all put on notice they are on a yellow and so there was even a meeting before the game how to make their yellow cards so as not to miss the decisive next match but Abdullahi Shehu was never in the mix.
■ FIFA sent notice after the match against Zambia that Shehu is suspended for Algeria match but sent the email directly to the technical officer in charge whom incidentally was hospitalized at that period with a serious heart problem so was not on emails and couldn’t have seen it.
■ On match day against Algeria neither the match Commissioner was aware nor the away team and ABDULLAHI played the match without any protest or notice from either side.
■ Algerian never protested as they too are not aware but FIFA sent NFF a query to ask why the player played. NFF duly responded with proofs that the notice was sent to an email account of a technical staff that was Hospitalized with proofs. The FIFA disciplinary committee met and decided since previous emails has always been sent to same account and were taking so the notice is valid and sanctioned Nigeria.
■ Yes it’s a really a bad mistake but thank God it’s not costly and NFF is already reorganizing the Technical and Competitions departments to ensure this horrendous mistake never happened again as this mistake is clearly the lack of delingence of the Technical department and the Competitions departments.
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