Football Kenya Federation believe Confederation of African Football's decision to postpone the 2022 Fifa World Cup qualifiers by three months will give Harambee Stars ample time to be at par with their opponents.
While most local clubs were inactive for the past few weeks due to the government's decision to suspend sports as a containment measure against Covid-19, Stars rivals in the qualification group, Uganda, Rwanda and Mali have had their top leagues still in action.
In a statement on Thursday, the African football governing body cited the havoc wrecked by the coronavirus pandemic on football schedules across the continent as the main reason to push forward the qualifiers.
"The CAF emergency committee in consultation with Fifa decided to postpone the CAF qualifier for the Fifa World Cup, Qatar 2022 that were due to be played in June 2021 after taking into consideration the current challenges caused by the Covid -19 pandemic and the need to ensure optimal playing conditions for participating team," explained CAF.
The African football governing body further revealed: "The qualifiers will now take place in the existing windows of September, October, November and March 2022."
The move by CAF will be a blessing in disguise for the Kenyan national team given that a bulk of the squad preferred by Stars' head coach Jacob Mulee in the last international assignment have not been in action for six weeks.
"It's a good decision, we appreciate it," said FKF President Nick Mwendwa in reaction to CAF's decision.
"Of course,we would have loved to play but CAF has assessed the situation and felt that it is good to postpone the matches for now. We feel then it's a good decision for us because our league wasn't on. It now gives us more time for our players to regain their fitness and prepare adequately for the matches."
Meanwhile, CAF have promised to review their Covid-19 protocols in the wake of complaints that host nations were taking advantage of the process to lock out particular players from matchday squads by registering alleged fake Covid-19 positive tests.
Stars had such concerns in their away match against Togo in an African Cup of Nations qualifiers where key first-team players among them Michael Olunga, Kenneth Muguna, Joash Onyango were ruled out after allegedly testing positive having earlier tested negative prior to their travel to Lome.
"CAF is reassessing its protocols and processes to enhance the implementation of Covid related protocols including specifically focusing on pre-match testing which had been the source of some challenges in previous windows," concluded the statement.