THE Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) is to meet today with four schools that were part of one of the most bizarre afternoons in schoolboy football in Jamaica for a long time.

The meeting which forms part of the investigations into one of the most shameful evenings in schoolboy sports we have seen in a long time, is nothing but an exercise in futility.

Nothing meaningful will come out of the meeting, but we will hear that an investigation has been carried out, case closed.

This is not a knock against ISSA, but the association is not equipped to carry out this investigation, plus ISSA cannot investigate itself which is what it is in fact trying to do, despite its good intentions.

To take it a bit further, what if ISSA does find that there were wrongdoings, what exactly could it do? I could be wrong, but I don’t think there is anything in the ISSA statutes to deal with what we think went on last week in Kingston.

Maybe next season we will see a new rule being added to the ISSA rules of competitions, but for this year, their collective hands are tied.

Unless the Jamaica Football Federation, the ruling body for the sport in Jamaica, takes over the investigations, as they can do, and if wrongdoings are found to have taken place, issues punishment according to FIFA rules, nothing will happen.

Not so long ago, we watched as Kingston College dragged school sport just that bit further down the slippery slope when they fired coach Lenworth Hyde mid-way the season, when they still had a mathematical chance of advancing.

There were howls of protest last week Wednesday after Jamaica College, the defending champions in the Manning Cup competition, beat Denham Town High 16-0 in a second round game to edge Excelsior High on goal difference and advanced to the semi-final. Excelsior had come up short after beating Lime Cup finalists Holy Trinity 12-0.

Excelsior had gone into the game leading JC on goal difference and so the latter had to win their game by two more goals than Excelsior to get the edge and continue playing in the competition.

Even a cursory glance should raise alarms with these lopsided scores at this stage of the competition – one step from the semi-finals – but a closer look raises even more serious concerns, not with just the schools taking part but the referee in the Jamaica College game.

At full time Jamaica College led 10-0 and that is well within the realms of possibility, a powerfully assembled team needing goals to survive against a team that might be overwhelmed after going down, say, 5-0 just shy of 40 minutes.

Where it gets surreal is when the referee decides in all his wisdom and experience to add all of six minutes to a game that got way out of hand a long time ago.

I have spoken to several experienced referees and they all agree that time added on is not mandatory and in this particular case the game should have been called off after 90 minutes had elapsed. There was nothing within the rules of the game or proper sportsmanship to extend this game any further.

But it was not over and it got from bad to worse, after scoring 10 goals in 90 minutes, an average of one every nine minutes, when they were still fresh and before running 90 minutes in the hot sun, Jamaica College then managed a mind- boggling six goals in six minutes.

This would require that each time Jamaica College scored a goal the ball would be rushed back to the centre circle and Denham Town would just pass it back to them and watch them score again.

Shamefully it does get worse, a member of the Jamaica College team was heard on national television later that night chastising the teams in the Excelsior game that started 15 minutes after their game did, insinuating foul play.

Some people just don’t get it.