Make sure the ink is dry

Supersport United are strong early candidates for 2014's foot-in mouth award, after the strange goings-on regarding the future of Kaizer Chiefs striker Lehlohonolo Majoro. Photo by Lee Warren

Supersport United are strong early candidates for 2014's foot-in mouth award, after the strange goings-on regarding the future of Kaizer Chiefs striker Lehlohonolo Majoro. Photo by Lee Warren

Published Jan 8, 2014

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Supersport United are strong early candidates for 2014’s foot-in mouth award, after the strange goings-on regarding the future of Kaizer Chiefs striker Lehlohonolo Majoro.

Matsatsantsa usually give the impression of being an extremely professionally run outfit, but their balls-ups this week have been straight out of a Laurel and Hardy skit. First, on Friday, they confirmed the signing of Majoro from Chiefs, although Majoro, it emerged, had signed nothing.

This might be termed the first rule of any transfer window – do not announce that you have signed a player, unless the player has scrawled his John Hancock on a binding contract.

SuperSport had, it seems, reached an agreement with Majoro’s agent, Tim Sukazi, and Chiefs, but not with the player himself.

So it was that the Tshwane club were forced to cancel a press conference on Monday, and they then announced that they had withdrawn their interest in Mr Majoro.

But the fun did not stop there. Matsatsantsa released a statement in which they quoted CEO Stan Matthews as saying: “We had agreed on personal terms with Majoro and in principle he was a SuperSport United player. Unfortunately we didn’t know he had signed a pre-contract with Orlando Pirates without his agent being notified.”

A few hours later, however, came a corrective statement from the extremely busy SuperSport offices: “SuperSport United wishes to apologise to Orlando Pirates FC for any inconvenience that might have been caused by the press statement earlier,” it read.

“Our CEO Stanley Matthews was quoted in the statement as saying that ‘Lehlohonolo Majoro had signed a pre-contract with Orlando Pirates’. This is however not true and the statement was sent out without the CEO’s approval.”

At this point hopefully someone at SuperSport managed to put the shovel back in the garden shed and stopped digging the hole for themselves any deeper.

Pirates publicly voiced their dismay at SuperSport, though it will be of no surprise to anyone if Majoro is soon running out in the black and white of the Buccaneers.

The whole Majoro situation, indeed, is probably not black and white at all. Rarely has the saying “there is no smoke without fire” looked so apt when pointed at SuperSport’s initial statement regarding Pirates.

Was such a statement simply pulled from thin air, by a club angry at losing a player’s signature? I have my doubts.

But there is no doubt, at the very least, that Matsatsantsa have got the political game hideously wrong. The next time SuperSport United sign a player, they had best make sure the ink is dried. - The Star

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