The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
📌 #SPARChallenge March 24-31
🇿🇦 SPAR Proteas
🇿🇦 SA President’s XII
🇿🇦 SPAR Baby Proteas
🇺🇬 Uganda’s She Cranes
🇳🇦 Namibia (TBC)
Johannesburg, South Africa | THE INDEPENDENT | Following the relaxation of lockdown level three restrictions, Netball South Africa has today announced that netball activities will resume effective from Monday 08th February 2021. Among the first items on the calendar will in invitation tournament in Cape Town involving the hosts South Africa, Uganda and Namibia next month.
“The decision to resume netball activities was not an easy one, because we are still amid a pandemic and we needed to be very careful on how we will do things going forward. This was a balancing act, because key to our list of priorities is ensuring that we preserve the lives of all our stakeholders whilst we play the sport we love,” said Cecilia Molokwane, Netball South Africa President.
The first event that will take place, according to the Netball South Africa website, is the SPAR Challenge which was supposed to happen at the beginning of the year. The participating teams will be the SPAR Proteas, the SA President’s XII, the SPAR Baby Proteas (under 21), Uganda’s She Cranes with Namibia yet to confirm participation.
The SPAR Challenge will take place under strict health and safety regulations, this tournament will happen in a biologically safe environment in Cape Town from the 24th to 31st of March 2021. The teams will meet for a pre-training camp between the 19th and 23rd of March 2021.
For the event, Cape Town will partner with Netball SA to prepare for the 2023 Netball World Cup
The SPAR Proteas team and SA President’s XII team were announced in December 2020. Dr Elsje Jordaan, head coach of the SPAR Baby Proteas, will announce her final team before the SPAR Challenge. She will use this series to get some game time for her players and get combinations right ahead of the under 21 Netball World Youth Cup in Fiji at the end of the year.
Other countries have blocked traveling to and from South Africa because of the new trickier variant of COVID-19 and here we are talking of sending an entire team to play in a tournament of close contact sport without masks starting with a match against a team from the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Africa?
What would happen if they missed this tournament?
What happened to arresting people for attempted murder if they cause unnecessary crowding during this pandemic?
Don’t we have Ugandans who are still in jail for flouting COVID-19 SOPs during our election campaigns?
Can Ugandans really be blamed for not taking SOPs seriously when double even triple standards are being applied to SOPs?
Why does it seem as though there is nobody in charge of this situation?
Aren’t we slowly adopting Magufuli’s head-in-the-sand approach to managing this pandemic?
Who is supposed to be asking these questions and who is supposed to be answering these questions? When?