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Kenny Ndebele

Augustine Hwata Senior Sports Reporter
Premier Soccer League chief executive Kenny Ndebele said all clubs in the elite league have until the end of this week to submit their provisional squads for the first half of the 2015 season.

Ndebele said all the clubs should register their provisional 30-man squads between today and Friday with five of the players expected to be juniors below the age of 20.

“We have asked the clubs to start submitting their lists to our offices. I hope we will get all team lists by Friday.

“It should be a maximum of 30 players each and five of the players should be juniors,” said Ndebele.

The 16 PSL clubs are required to register 25 senior players and five junior players (born after January 1, 1996) who are part of their developmental sides.

Ndebele, however, pointed out that Friday was only an administrative deadline for team submissions in preparation for the 2015 season kick-off on March 7 2015.

The January transfer window will be closing on March 25 and Ndebele said there will be no extra slots for any club as was the case with Dynamos last season.

League champions Dynamos were allowed to register 35 players after pleading that they wanted to guard against injuries possibly sustained in the African Champions League.

“No team will be allowed to have extra players and we have seen that it was an oversight which was done on the part of Zifa last year.

“The Harare Declaration (2009) clearly states that only 30 players must be registered and five should be juniors. We will carry an exercise to determine the players used by each team this season.

“If we can look closely at some clubs, some players only played two matches and this ended up creating problems over contracts and payments.

“So for this season we want to guard against bringing the name of the league into disrepute and clubs should only register players they can use,” said Ndebele.

As part of their raft of measures to improve efficiency, Ndebele said the league is seeking to capture all the vital statistics for each player this season.

“We want to get the data on the number to times that a player will have been used and even the goals.

“Last season we ended up having problems on the top goal scorer when such confusion could have been avoided if we had a system to capture the statistics,” said Ndebele.

Former Highlanders striker Charles Sibanda and How Mine’s Kuda Musharu ended up sharing the Golden Boot on 12 goals each despite claims by Sibanda that he had scored one more than his rival.

“We usually rely on reports from referees but there are also humans and can err. So it’s also the duty of the team managers to try and submit their own reports for their matches on who was given a yellow card or red card and who has scored a goal.

“I think the best would be to have a software to capture and update all the stats but that would be subject to approval from the board of governors,” said Ndebele.

As part of their preparations for the 2015 league season, Ndebele said the league will hold an induction workshop for newly promoted sides on Thursday and Friday.

“We are holding an induction for all the four new teams and we have also invited clubs that were promoted last season,” he said.

Dongo Sawmills, Wha Wha, Flame Lily and Tsholotsho were promoted into elite league this season while ZPC Kariba and Chapungu also joined in 2014 as the other entries Chiredzi and Bantu found the going tough.

“We need to have the club chairman and secretaries-general so that we take them through the requirements,” he said.

PSL have approached the Zifa Assembly to have the number of teams relegated from the league reduced from four to two, but the challenge remains on the modalities of promoting two teams from four Division One leagues.