THE Premier Soccer League has put in place plans for the possibility that load shedding curtails its matches over the next month, especially a heavy programme of midweek fixtures, officials said yesterday.
The league has informed all the clubs and officials that should there be a blackout during a match, causing it to be abandoned because of Eskom's electricity travails, the match will be played again from the start, as would be the case if the match has been curtailed by force majeure.
Force majeure is defined as a "chance occurrence or unavoidable accident" and in legal terms as an "act of God".
The laws of the game state that a match that is abandoned because of natural causes will be replayed again in full but not those games disrupted through negligence, sabotage or poor preparation.
"If a match is postponed or abandoned through weather or the state of the pitch, the league will set another date on which the match will be played," states the PSL rules. "All records of an abandoned match will be expunged except that any dismissals that occurred will remain in force."
But matches stopped because of floodlight failure, or other man-made incidents, are picked up from where they left off, completing the 90 minutes with the score intact from the time when the game was abandoned. This prevents sabotage to avoid defeat, like if a losing team purposely turned off the floodlights in the hope they would get to start the game from scratch again.
But with Eskom now forced to implement more power outages and rolling blackouts to take pressure off the national grid, there is no foretelling when floodlights will fail and as a result that is now also considered force majeure by the league for the foreseeable future.
PSL load-shedding rule
THE Premier Soccer League has put in place plans for the possibility that load shedding curtails its matches over the next month, especially a heavy programme of midweek fixtures, officials said yesterday.
The league has informed all the clubs and officials that should there be a blackout during a match, causing it to be abandoned because of Eskom's electricity travails, the match will be played again from the start, as would be the case if the match has been curtailed by force majeure.
Force majeure is defined as a "chance occurrence or unavoidable accident" and in legal terms as an "act of God".
The laws of the game state that a match that is abandoned because of natural causes will be replayed again in full but not those games disrupted through negligence, sabotage or poor preparation.
"If a match is postponed or abandoned through weather or the state of the pitch, the league will set another date on which the match will be played," states the PSL rules. "All records of an abandoned match will be expunged except that any dismissals that occurred will remain in force."
But matches stopped because of floodlight failure, or other man-made incidents, are picked up from where they left off, completing the 90 minutes with the score intact from the time when the game was abandoned. This prevents sabotage to avoid defeat, like if a losing team purposely turned off the floodlights in the hope they would get to start the game from scratch again.
But with Eskom now forced to implement more power outages and rolling blackouts to take pressure off the national grid, there is no foretelling when floodlights will fail and as a result that is now also considered force majeure by the league for the foreseeable future.
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