By: Moboluwarin Ogunleye and Emmanuel Utibe
On the 16th of October, 2023, at the SUB pitch there was controversy as the Microbiology players who were supposed to play their SEALS Cup knockout game against MBBS were noticeably absent.
News getting to Indy Press correspondents was that at 3:28pm in a certain “SEALS Cup banter group”, a message was dropped as to the postponement of the match till Wednesday evening purportedly from the SEALS Cup planning committee.
However, the message was later deleted by an admin. But we later confirmed that an earlier notification was sent to the official SEALS cup group with the UIMSA sports secretary and Coach expressing their disagreement with such a provision which goes against the already laid down rules of the competition to which the organizers ghosted.
Also around that time when some MBBS students were already on the pitch and the game before their match had commenced, a call was put through to the sports secretary of UIMSA, informing him of this postponement.
Most players were unaware of any postponement until the end of the IPE vs Sociology game when the match officials were leaving, saying that the organizers had called them that the MBBS match had been postponed.
Attempts to speak to the organizers of the competition who were available to watch the match between IPE and Sociology were hampered as they were nowhere to be seen for sometime after the match.
Eventually when they came around, they were hostile towards the press resorting to making rude remarks at Indy Press correspondents and saying they would not be giving any statement.
Speaking to the MBBS coach, Mr Mark Obeya, he expressed his displeasure at the organizers of the tournament stating that their postponement was against the clear rules of the competition. “It is wrong, the rules are clear and then the reason for their absence is funny, because they were originally to come for the match, it was only a small group of people in a particular class having a field trip. And they were going to play the match until they found out that the chemistry match was postponed,” he lamented.
Talking further, he even noted that he was asked to make his squad as broad as possible so as to avoid situations like this.
Upon being asked for his thoughts on the final resolutions by the organizers he said “I’ll try to get my players to come back tomorrow, we’ll come back tomorrow. Maybe 4 or 5”
