WINDHOEK – Namibian football may find the going tough on the field of play, but there seems to be no stopping the Namibia Football Association (NFA) from making commendable inroads into the business of global football.
Namibia’s football supremo, John Muinjo, has been bestowed the rare honour of overseeing the high profile international friendly between hosts South Africa and five times world champions Brazil at Soccer City, near Johannesburg, tonight. Muinjo is among very few Fifa accredited match assessors on the African continent and currently Namibia’s only match assessor. Among his dozens of responsibilities and roles when he arrives at the match venue is to convene a match coordination meeting, while he must also monitor the movement and activities around the match officials by not allowing them to come into any sort of contact with anybody for obvious reasons.
Match assessors are required to look at the degree of difficulty of the match and to monitor and report on the performance of referees by looking into various aspects, such as the control of the game, correct and consistent interpretation and the application of the laws governing the beautiful game. He or she must also look at the physical fitness and positioning of match officials where stamina, speed, acceleration, movement and assertiveness are observed. They are also required to work with assistant referees and the 4th official, while the assistant referees are evaluated in terms of accuracy of signals, off-side situations, fouls, foul throws, goal kicks and flagging techniques.
The 4th official is evaluated in terms of cooperation with the match and assistant referees, as well as his control of the technical areas. Also, the assessor should include in his report 2 or 3 strong points and allocate points for improvement on the officials’ overall showing.
He or she should also set as priorities the actual incidents based on the match in the final analysis whereupon he or she should analyze the overall performance with the refereeing team after the match, while the crucial decisions analysis has to be done afterwards through TV evidence.
By Carlos Kambaekwa