Nigerian club Plateau United have alleged foul play following their CAF Champions League defeat to Simba.
The Nigerian side suffered a 1-0 defeat on aggregate to the Tanzanian club following a 0-0 draw at the National Stadium, Dar es Salaam on Saturday.
United had lost at home 0-1 to Simba in the first leg of the preliminary round clash on 29 November.
Plateau however allege that their Tanzanian opponents adopted underhand tactics to influence the result of the second leg of the preliminary round game.
“The truth is that we put ourselves in a difficult situation when we failed to win the first leg,” club spokesman, Albert Dakup told SPNAfrica. “We were eliminated because of the first leg loss in Jos.
“We doninated the game in Tanzania and missed two big goalscoring chances in the second half.”
Dakup then added that Plateau United will be filing a protest to the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) over what the Nigerian club believes represent underhand tactics employed by their hosts.
“We (Plateau United) are lodging a complaint with CAF because two of our players Ibrahim Abubakar and Sunday Adetunji and our chief coach, Maurice Naanmiap were reported by the Tanzanians of testing positive for Covid-19 under very controversial circumstances.
“We suspect a foul play because two such tests were conducted in Jos just before we travelled to Tanzania and they all returned negative.
“We see this as a deliberate attempt to reduce our strength because the two players really tormented them when we played them in Jos.
“We have already informed the NFF about the development.
“We are saddened that some of our African brothers still view football as do or die affair especially after we treated them so well when they visited Nigeria for the first leg.
“We sent five buses to convey then from the airport to town when they came to Jos. However, when we arrived in Tanzania, there was nobody from the Simba or even the Tanzanian FA was on hand to receive us.”
