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Chiefs to weed out age cheats

Meshack Khotha

Meshack Khotha

Kaizer Chiefs are determined to root out cheating in their development programme.

This was revealed by the club's Under-13 coach, Terror Sephooa, in an interview with Sowetan at the juniors' training session in Johannesburg last week.

Amakhosi last week pulled out their under-15 team from the Manchester United under-15 Nike Cup competition in order to verify the ages of all players registered in their development programme.

Sephooa, one of the country's top development coaches, explained how he discovered nine over-age players who were recruited to play for the Under-13 team in March this year.

On collecting more data on the players, he decided to double check the information to make sure that they were within the required age limit.

Said a worried Sephooa: "To my surprise, I found that nine of the players were over the age of 13 when we were on the verge of registering them.

"We found out that these players were using their younger brothers' birth certificates. There are corrupt people out there who are hellbent on destroying the futures of these youngsters. Our development of football is going nowhere as long as we have such corrupt people in the game. We need to name and shame them."

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