Stuart Baxter has spoken about the possibility of Kaizer Chiefs falling completely out of the title race because of the Premier Soccer League punishing them with walkover results.
The Glamour Boys are still awaiting the outcome of their arbitration process after taking the matter over their December fixtures against Cape Town City and Golden Arrows to the SAFA following the PSL’s initial ruling against Chiefs.
As a consequence there is a high probability that Chiefs might lose the games as walkovers after they didn’t pitch but their opponents and the match officials did.
Baxter, though, has insisted the PSL should look at how other leagues have adopted their rules because of the pandemic, using the ongoing postponements in the English Premier League as an example.
“I think that it would be easy for me to grasp that as a bit of an excuse Wouldn’t it? I could be all COVID, oh down to COVID,” he told journalists.
“[But] the whole globe, the Global Football has been suffering.
“What I would say is that many leagues have been learning as they’ve gone along. They’ve made a ruling and then they’ve realized ‘we’ve got to be more flexible than that’. And many leagues have done that.
“And I would just hope that we can do that in [South Africa] and I realize there is arbitration and all these things, so I can’t say too much. But I would hope that that will be the what comes out of this, that we move along with the knowledge we have of the situation.
“Now, I don’t think there’s anybody in the [English] Premier League, who’ve had anywhere near [the outbreak] that we had. But there have been clubs that have had their games postponed and rearranged.
“So I hope that we get we get to that point. If we don’t, we’ll have to deal with it. But I’m not going to use this as an excuse.”
Baxter also insisted that if the PSL and SAFA would rule against Chiefs, their last chances of having a chance to catch Masandawana in the title race would be over.
“But it would have been absolutely nice to have played those games and to be able to try to exact a little bit more pressure on Sundowns, because at the moment they’re playing with no one breathing down the necks,” he added.
“We potentially – and it is a hypothetical question because we’d have to play the games – but we potentially could have been the ones to do that.”
Chiefs currently sit 16 points behind the log leaders but have three games in hand before the ruling on their December fixtures.
