Malawi Defence Force (MDF) teams cannot be reached on their Airtel lines as they all crashed out of the Airtel Top 8 Cup after a dismal campaign.<\/p>\n
Three soldiers\u2019 teams\u2014 Moyale, Kamuzu Barracks and Mafco\u2014 missed out on semifinal slots after failing to find the back of the net in both their home and away quarterfinal matches.<\/p>\n
This means the competition\u2019s last-four stage will involve one police side and three civilian teams.<\/p>\n
MDF sides\u2019 poor campaign in the second edition of the competition was summed up on Saturday as Mafco crashed out of the tournament when they lost 1-0 on aggregate to Blue Eagles.<\/p>\n
The Saturday match at Chitowe in Dwangwa, Nkhotakota District, ended in a barren draw.<\/p>\n
Moyale Barracks were shown the exit from the tournament by Nyasa Big Bullets, who won on a 1-0 aggregate scoreline, whereas Kamuzu Barracks followed suit with a 2-0 aggregate loss to Be Forward Wanderers.<\/p>\n
The cup has, since its inauguration last year, proved that MDF teams are good at missing their calls when in the final third.<\/p>\n
It was a similar story on Saturday as Mafco squandered numerous scoring opportunities with Ranken Mwale, Martin Masoatheka and Emmanuel Chipeta emerging as the main culprits.<\/p>\n
Mwale missed the best chances of the game but he broke the hearts of Mafco fans when he shot wide with Eagles goalkeeper, John Soko, already beaten.<\/p>\n
Mafco assistant Coach, Tione Tembo, was left ruing the missed chances.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had the chances to bury the game in the first half. We could have scored two or three goals but we were shy in front of goal. I do not know what happened to the players,\u201d Tembo said.<\/p>\n
Some quarters have attributed the lack of goals in the tournament to great defending from all the teams whereas others point fingers at strikers for letting their teams down.<\/p>\n
It remains to be seen if the goals will begin to flow in the semifinal stage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malawi Defence Force (MDF) teams cannot be reached on their Airtel lines as they all crashed out of the Airtel Top 8 Cup after a dismal campaign. Three soldiers\u2019 teams\u2014 Moyale, Kamuzu Barracks and Mafco\u2014 missed out on semifinal slots after failing to find the back of the net in both their home and away […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":65886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65882"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65887,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65882\/revisions\/65887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}