LONDON: Saudi Arabia will have no officials at the World Cup after FIFA decided to cut the disgraced Fahad Al-Mirdasi from its list of referees and remove innocent assistants Mohammed Al-Abakry and Abdulah Al-Shalwai as they were due to work in tandem with Al-Mirdasi.
Al-Mirdasi was banned by life by the Saudi Football Federation (SAFF) for offering to take a bribe to influence the outcome of the King’s Cup final and they urged FIFA to remove him from the 36-man pool of referees for the tournament in Russia.
After reviewing all the evidence, FIFA took the action everyone expected, outlining in a statement that “the conditions to be selected for the 2018 FIFA World Cup are not satisfied anymore and therefore has decided that the selection of Mr. Fahad Al-Mirdasi is withdrawn with immediate effect.”
The news will have come as no surprise to Al-Mirdasi, who is banned from participating in any football activity for life in the Kingdom, but the decision to remove assistants Al-Abakry and Al-Shalwai from the 99-man list will come as a body blow to the pair. They were not involved in the incident that led to Al-Mirdasi being banned and this World Cup was supposed to represent the peak of their careers.
“In line with FIFA’s overall philosophy of seeking to appoint match officials together as a team of three during the preparation, the FIFA Referees Committee has therefore also decided to remove the two assistant referees Mohammed Al-Abakry and Abdulah Al-Shalwai, who are in Referee Al-Mirdasi’s team,“ added the statement.
SAFF has been informed about the news and it will come as a crushing blow as they had said the call-up of three officials was “a great motivation for us at the SAFF to enhance our work in developing Saudi referees.”
UAE official Mohammed Abdulla is a beneficiary of the decision to withdraw the Saudi trio as he, along with Japan’s Ryuji Sato, has been called up as an emergency replacement.
Other Arab referees bound for Russia are Bahrain’s Nawaf Shukralla, Egypt’s Gehad Grisha and Algeria’s Mehdi Abid while there will also be eight Arab assistant referees representing Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
