Two Malawain sides played a game of 10-a-side amid fears that voodoo magic could be at work. The entire second half of the match between Moyale Barracks and Dwangwa United was played with both teams a man light. The concerns started before the game when Dwangwa’s Winter Mpota waited for all the Moyale players to step onto the pitch before entering the field of play himself.
Suspicious that black magic or juju might be at work, Moyale repeated the trick at the start of the second half with Charles Kamanga waiting for Mpota to enter the pitch. Mpota put a spanner in the works by not going on to the pitch, and both sides played out the game with 10 men.
That is the story in a nutshell, but we couldn’t resist a quote from Moyale’s acting team manager Lieutenant Precious Gausi Monday. He said: “One of our players alerted us that Dwangwa have a funny habit of delaying in fielding their eleventh player unless all players for the visiting field have entered the pitch, so we agreed that we should also delay ours in the second half, to dilute the juju.
“We told Kamanga to stay behind and wait for the Dwangwa player [Mpota] to go in first but this never happened and we ended up playing with 10 men each the entire second half.” [Via Daily Times]