AFF U23 Championship: Tournament Committee grants more leverage to teams to replace unavailable players due to Covid-19 outbreak

The AFF Tournament Committee has relaxed the rules that allow a participating team to replace a registered player in the ongoing AFF U23 Championship.

They have amended article 33.4 of the tournament regulations, which provides that a team that requires to replace a player may do so from the final registered players up to six hours prior to their first match in the competition should they fulfil certain conditions set forth therein.

After making the necessary amendments the committee now allows a team to replace a player from the final registration, with 12 hours’ notice to the AFF Secretariat. Such replacement players need not necessarily be registered in the preliminary registration list.

A total of 10 players can be replaced by a team for the entire duration of the competition. However, the replaced players would not be allowed to participate in the Competition again and their names would be struck off from the team list for the remainder of the Competition.

To further elaborate, if a team has registered 35 players in the preliminary registration and 24 in the final registration they can now replace up to 10 players from the list. The replacement will be a one-to-one replacement i.e., the final registration list will remain to be 24 after the replacement. Therefore, the players whose names are being replaced would not be able to continue to play in the competition once replaced.

However, it must be noted that as per article 13.4 of the tournament regulations, a fixture shall be deemed abandoned if any team fields fewer than seven players at any stage of a match. Therefore, all teams have to necessarily field seven players for a match to be played, irrespective of whether any replacement has occurred or not.