August 03, 2007	Friday	Rajab 18, 1428

KARACHI, Aug 2: The Pakistan Football Federation’s (PFF) lethargic approach in providing the results of its various tournaments continued to irk the media after the five-day old results of the ongoing Under-18 PFF Youth Cup were circulated by the federation’s media department.

To give an example, result of the preliminary round match between Karachi A and Karachi C, which was played at Karachi’s CDGK Stadium on July 27 and resulted in a 5-2 victory for the former, was e-mailed to respective media publications after a delay of almost five days on Wednesday.

However, Director Operations of the PFF, Wg-Cdr Pervaiz Mir (retd), when confronted with the persistent delays, came up with an excuse which reflected how the affairs of the sport are being run by the governing body.

The senior official said his role was to pass on the results received from various centres and he was not responsible if the media manager was not disseminating the match results the same day.

“My duty is to receive results from all over the country and give them to the media manager who is responsible to circulate them to the media,” Pervaiz told Dawn.

While he flatly refused to take responsibility for the delayed communication of the PFF tournament results, he also absolved the media manager of his responsibility in the matter.

“I don’t know whether obsolete match results are being circulated from the media department. Our media manager must be overburdened. But I can’t help you, except for giving you the cell numbers of the coordinators at the centres hosting the matches,” said the PFF official.

Information gathered from reliable sources confirmed that obsolete results were being provided by PFF’s present media manager since the time he took charge. Even match results of the prestigious Premier League and B division league were provided after several days which could have proved misleading if not correctly tallied.

The PFF’s official website maintained by its media department is also found wanting in updating the match schedules, results and other news and is chiefly being used as a tool for projection of the PFF chief Faisal Saleh Hayat, FIFA and AFC officials.

In the events section of the website, the ‘latest’ information available refers to events played in June. Neither the results of the ongoing PFF Youth Cup matches are provided on the website nor the event has been included in the calendar of the PFF activities.

Some links for national events like the fifth national Under-16 championship lead to results of 14th Asian Cup qualifying matches.

It is incomprehensible why the PFF is not making an effort to enhance its communication/information network despite the fact that FIFA has been doling out millions of dollars in grants for setting up offices at the PFF headquarters in Lahore to run affairs in a professional manner.