July 14 – New Zealand are to take legal action after their men’s team were controversially thrown out of Olympic football qualifying for fielding an ineligible player.
The Kiwis were due to play Fiji in the final of the regional competition after beating Vanuatu 2-0 in the semis. Instead, Vanuatu launched a protest, upheld by the Oceania Football Confederation (OCF) which ruled that South-African born Deklan Wynne (pictured) should not have played.
Tiny Vanuatu were immediately awarded a 3-0 win and replaced New Zealand in the final, losing on penalties to Fiji who will now represent the region at next year’s Rio Olympics.
Left-back Wynne, 20, represented New Zealand at the Under-20 World Cup last month. But the OCF’s disciplinary committee deemed he did not meet any of the relevant criteria that would allow him to represent New Zealand in the Olympic competition.
New Zealand football officials were furious the OFC had not told them of the outcome until just hours before the final. NZF chief executive Andy Martin said in a statement they were preparing an appeal.
“New Zealand Football has acted in good faith at all times and we would have expected any issues on player eligibility to have been raised in advance, through the process we were given, so that they could have been dealt with properly in a timely fashion,” Martin said.
Wynne was apparently deemed ineligible under a FIFA statute relating to players acquiring a new nationality. Under that article, the player, a parent or grandparent must have been born in the country concerned. If ineligible under the those criteria, players can still qualify if they have lived in their “new” country for five years continuously since the age of 18, making Wynne too young to qualify under that clause.
“This is hugely embarrassing for New Zealand Football and for football,” Martin told a news conference. ” I think we have done a lot of great things in the last 12 months in terms of getting football on the map in this country.”
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