Underage cheating

Was reading an interesting article in the Times today about new measures being taken to detect underage cheating in the upcoming U-20s World Cup and other youth tournaments. There's a new device out now which can tell how old a person is to within a couple of months. Since it's come in, a few countries (particularly African and Asian ones) have curiously pulled out of some tournaments, and that Asian and African teams in general haven't had the same impact at underage level. There's been general allegations of 20-year-olds playing U-16 level and players in the mid-20s playing at U-20s! Nigeria have come out and admitted that they've done this, but have said they've now stopped as it does more harm than good in the long-term. I suppose if you look at Ghana's underage success (fourth in the U-20 World Cup in 1997) compared to the senior team, it might explain a lot!

The article goes on to say that it'll be interesting to see how the Irish team does in the UAE considering that Saudi Arabia and Mexico (who were banned from Italia '90 for playing overage players in a youth competition), who are two of our opponents, are two of the suspected biggest abusers. If it's true, it reasons, we should do a lot better than at previous World Cups.

it would be great to see this applied to schoolboy football here as i see every week kids who are blatently over the age they are supposed to be playing at.this both cheats the kids who are getting whopped by these bangers and also the over age kids themselves .is anybody else sick of seeing this happening every week.????

Definitely happens here at club level. Legendary story in Limerick re Mick Crowe winning the F.A.I. Minor for Ballynanty in 1975 by getting the birth cert of an overage Donegal player after Balla lost the semi by dressing up as a priest and pretending to be new in the parish.

Although anothe rLimerick club luckily got out of Limerick only to shock everyone by stuffing Cherry Orchard in Dublin (7 overage players did the trick).

However we have never done it at International level to my knowledge and I doubt if we did. It should help us in the UAE.

doesnt happen so often in our league thanks mainly to the punishment for doing so(removal of the offending team from the league and stiff fines.