LEST WE FORGET Robson Sharuko on Saturday IT’S rather easy to forget now, in the depression of the darkness brought by a spate of recent poor results, that we used to have a troop of home- based Warriors who once went for a very good 16 international games without defeat. As we survey the wreckage of a failed Cosafa Cup defensive mission and a CHAN qualifying campaign that now perilously hangs by a thread, it’s hard to believe that we once had a team, not so long ago, of home-based players, which went for 32 months, without losing an international match. For those who are wizards of mathematics, that’s a good two-and-a-half years plus, or you could convert it into something like 24 hours of football or, if you like the big numbers, that’s a cool 1 440 minutes of soccer as the Americans will prefer to call it, without losing an international match. Between May 4 2008 and February 5 2011, our home-based Warriors scripted a beautiful story, a marathon unbeaten run that remains a record for us in international football but one that hasn’t been given the credit that it deserves by the men and women we task with the responsibility of both keeping, and glorifying, such magical moments. It eclipsed the record unbeaten run, in international matches, of 13 matches by the super side that would later evolve into the Dream Team, from April 14, 1991 to April 24, 1993, stretching over 13 Nations Cup and World Cup qualifiers, in which the Warriors won seven games, drew six and lost none. The record 16-match unbeaten run by the band of home-based Warriors included 11 matches in the African Nations Championships, unbeaten in the qualifying campaign for the 2009 and 2011 CHAN tournaments, unbeaten at the 2009 CHAN finals in Cote d’Ivoire and unbeaten in the 2009 Cosafa Cup finals. Today, as we adjust to the brutal reality that we are no longer Cosafa Cup champions, and juggle with the possibility that we could, FOR THE FIRST TIME, fail to qualify for the CHAN finals should results not go our way in Ndola this afternoon, that battalion of home-based troops who turned their defiance into an art of how not to lose matches, look like Warriors from a distant past. But the truth is that all this good stuff was happening just five years ago, in our quest to qualify for our first CHAN tournament, just four years ago, when we played at our first CHAN finals and also won the Cosafa Cup, just three years ago when we battled to qualify for our second CHAN tourney and just two years ago when we arrived in Sudan for our second CHAN finals. So, one can understand really, when the fans who went through all that begin to ask what has gone wrong, how is it possible that a team like Mauritius can come here and steal a draw at Rufaro, how come our home-based players have become so average, to the point of being ordinary, they can barely send shivers down a team of part-timers from the Indian Ocean island? The same fans are right when they ask, in bars and in restaurants, in salons and in churches, at what point did we lose the focus, at what stage did the train go off the rails, at what stage did our home-based players become so average, to the point of being ordinary, they can no longer bury Indian Ocean part timers in our backyard? Something has been happening to our football and whatever it is, the picture doesn’t look good, and a closer analysis on the players, in our Premiership, provides a frightening reminder that there has been a sudden malfunction in the reproductive system that used to give us players of a decent quality, like those home-based Warriors who went for 16 international matches without a loss. In our world of denial, uncomfortable with living with the suffocating reality that someone apparently destroyed the nursery from where they used to grow and develop our decent quality footballers, we have staggered from one blame game to another and from one blame object to the other. Yes, the majority of our football leaders are absolute rubbish, so horrible to such an extent that suggesting they were plucked from hell would be making them look honourable, when the reality is that they are nothing but horrible. To pray for their rehabilitation, expecting that they will wake up tomorrow as better administrators, is as hopeless, if not downright foolish, as applying lipstick to a bull frog and hoping that it will somehow boost its chances of winning the Miss World beauty pageant for animals. Our plight, too, hasn’t been helped in any way by some shocking appointments, like the recruitment of amateur coaches like Klaus-Dieter Pagels to try and cut their milk teeth in the world of international football coaching, somehow at the ripe age of 63, plucking them from obscurity and giving them the licence to experiment with our flagship national football team. But while criticism has been heaped, with justification, on the game’s leadership, the national team coaches for their shortcomings, the football writers for their lack of attention to detail and their tendency to turn themselves into shameless public relations agents for the association rather than serious critics of a national game struggling for breath on its deathbed, the fans for turning against their players when things aren’t going well, one crucial arm has been left untouched. Our players have somehow been given the immunity, for one reason or another, to escape the scrutiny that should follow every touch, every move, every run, especially when they wear the green and gold of the national team, and we have somehow celebrated when mediocrity has been airlifted from nowhere and turned into Warriors.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 20:27:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015