FOOTBALL: Bored Mauritania President orders cup final to penalties - after an hour
According to reports ,Mauritania's President was so bored during his country's Super Cup final, he ordered the match to go to penalties, after just 63 minutes.
President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz’s patience with what we can only assume to be the turgid proceedings between FC Tevragh-Zeina and ACS Ksar had reached a head, and instead of waiting it out, he simply ordered that the two teams skip the remaining minutes.
With the score at 1-1 and much to the referee's dismay, he was dealt the instructions and spot kicks duly followed.
Tevragh-Zeina won the shootout and lifted the trophy, but the outlandish decision gave way to a surge of understandable outrage, to which the league’s footballing federation responded with a statement from its own president:
“I deny in the strongest terms the intervention of the President of the Republic,” Ahmed Ould Abderrahmane wrote in a statement. “The decision was made due to organizational issues in accordance with the presidents and the coaches of the two teams.”
Sure it was.