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Sharuko On Saturday
A FOOTBALLER with a Zimbabwean father helping a Dutch team reach their first European inter-club tournament final in 20 years.
And, in the process, closing in within one victory of the immortality of becoming the FIRST team to win all the three UEFA club competitions.
A footballer from Zambia helping a Scottish club move within one game of winning their first European inter-club tournament in 50 years.
And, in the process, closing in within one victory of the immortality that will come with being the FIRST Scottish club to win the Europa League crown.
A footballer from Zimbabwe having both the honour and leadership qualities to captain his English club back into the English Championship.
And, in the process, closing within touching distance of a return to the Premiership, by the time they mark a decade of their FA Cup success.
That high point came in the summer of 2013 when, one unforgettable afternoon at Wembley, the Latics of Wigan stunned the world with a 1-0 win over favourites Manchester City.
Roberto Mancini, the first coach to guide the Citizens to the league title in 44 years, was sacked two days after the defeat in that FA Cup final.
Wigan’s stunning triumph, though, came in a season with a sad ending as they became the first team in history to win the FA Cup, and suffer relegation from the Premiership, in the same season.
A Zimbabwean footballer helped his English club to return to the Premiership, in his first season, as a player at this level of the professional game.
He was their lucky charm of some sort, the guy whose presence usually meant they were unlikely to lose the match and, whose absence, in a way, always spelt doom.
And, just like that, he will be rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s finest footballers next season in the football Hollywood kingdom of the Premiership.
It’s not only his surname, which is synonymous with football in this country, the initial of his family name is from the very letter on which this country’s identity is plucked from.
And, unlike the others whose minds have been turned by the possibility of playing for England, he was clear from the word go — it’s Zim for him, it’s all that matters.
Someone in his family tree, a guy called Reuben Zemura, was once a leading administrator at Zimbabwe Saints back in the days when Chauya Chikwata was a proper and competitive football club.
It probably says a lot about their commitment to the national cause, as a family, that Reuben’s love affair with the game had to be expressed at a club with the name Zimbabwe, in its proud identity.
Jordan Zemura is just 22 and, the boy who was born in London but never forgot his roots as a Zimbabwean Warrior, has just made it into the Big League.
He is the latest addition to a fine crop of Warriors who have made the grade to play in this box office league which, in terms of viewership, dwarfs every other top-flight league in the world.
Bruce Grobbelaar was the first, back on August 28, 1981, when he made his debut for Liverpool in a 0-1 league defeat to Wolves at Molineux, in the Black Country.
Peter Ndlovu was just 18, when he arrived at Coventry City in 1991, a bargain acquisition from Highlanders before his explosion caught the interests of Liverpool and Arsenal.
Benjani Mwaruwari, Brendan Zibusiso Galloway and Marvelous Nakamba have since played in the English Premiership.
And, so has Reece Nelson, at Arsenal, whose contribution this week helped Dutch club Feyenoord Rotterdam book their place in the UEFA Conference Cup final.
Nelson’s father is a Zimbabwean and, for some time now, he has been on the radar of the Warriors team management.
A glamour date against Jose Mourinho, the serial winner who continues to defy experts who claim football has left his negative tactics behind, now awaits Nelson and his team in the final.
History also awaits them as they could become the FIRST club to win all the three UEFA inter-club tournaments after previous success in the Champions League and UEFA Cup.
It could even get better for us today with Admiral Muskwe’s Luton Town favoured to secure a spot in the play-offs for a place in the English Premiership next season.
All Luton, a town which many Zimbabweans have turned into their adopted home in England, need today is victory over struggling Reading to secure sixth spot and a place in the four-team play-off for a slot in the Premiership.
If they complete their Cinderella tale and win a Premiership slot, Luton Town will become the first club to make it, all the way from the fifth tier of English football, and back into the top-flight league since the National League and the Football League were introduced.
Incredibly, they would have taken less than 10 years to complete that incredible journey.
BRILLIANT BENZEMA IS CASTING A SPELL
Sorry, if all the above material offended you, at a time when all the attention has seemingly been fixed on the magic of the UEFA Champions League, the Miracle of Madrid or the Madness of Manchester.
I can understand the obsession with the wild events of the past two weeks when the UEFA Champions League provided a number of reminders why it remains the glamour inter-club tournament in the world.
The genuine article, a special playground of the world’s finest footballers, an annual exhibition of the best there is, in terms of both talent and technical genius, a grand parade of both greatness and brightness, remarkable fitness and, those moments, when the true beauty of this game is captured by its madness.
It’s not easy not to be seduced by a semi-final showdown which produces 11 goals, over two legs, in which another team scores half-a-dozen goals, against the tournament’s most successful side but, somehow, still ends on the losing side.
An epic game where a Panenka penalty ended up as the defining moment of the showdown, where — in both matches — the decisive goals were scored by the world’s best striker, by a considerable distance, a man whose immigrant parents came from Algeria.
The one whose international career they tried to bring to a premature ending, in April 2016, when the French football authorities announced he would not be picked for the national team again.
The man who, in his response to the decision by French manager, Didier Deschamps, to overlook him for selection for Euro 2016 told Marca newspaper the coach had “folded due to pressure from France’s racist element.”
The red-hot football star destroying the world’s best defenders, with the athleticism of a teenager, the marksmanship of a sniper and the ruthlessness of a serial killer is, amazingly, just seven months away from celebrating his 35th birthday.
He might even win the Ballon d’Or.
That would be a fitting climax to this fairy-tale, which has seen him emerge from the controversy of being accused of taking part in a prostitute ring, where some underage girls were abused.
He also suffered the embarrassment of being arrested by French police for allegedly blackmailing a fellow international footballer, Mathieu Valbuena over the recording of a sex-tape on a mobile phone.
Karim Benzema has been around for quite some time, after all 16 years have passed since he made his international debut for France, on November 9, 2006.
But, like fine wine, he has seemingly matured with age and, after years of playing in the shadow of Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid, he has emerged into his own man, a fearless warrior with the killer instinct of a lion, writing probably this Champions League’s greatest story.
I can understand why many football fans have been seduced by what has been unfolding in the Champions League, which could be part of the greatest football story ever written, if the steamrolling Reds of Liverpool complete the QUADRUPLE.
For some of us, of a fading red persuasion, trapped in a romance with a club which has lost its way, men who seem to have gone to the same school, where they teach how not to administer football — be it at a club like Manchester United or an association like ZIFA, a QUADRUPLE for Liverpool will hurt.
It will drag our TREBLE into the shade, never again to be celebrated as the benchmark of greatness, as the symbol of excellence and, of course, as the ultimate product for football’s finest glory hunters.
But, it’s something we have to embrace because, given the second half blitzkrieg, which destroyed Villarreal this week, thanks to the genius of a footballer, Luis Diaz, with the potential of becoming the best in the world, this Liverpool appears unstoppable.
Don’t pinch yourself, it’s me who has said this and I can declare that I will pass a breathalyser test to show that I have not been influenced, in any way, by a dosage of alcohol.
SPARE A THOUGHT FOR PEP, THE FLAWED GENIUS
As we celebrate the success of Jurgen Klopp and his Reds, we should spare a thought for Pep Guardiola, the flawed genius who, in his quest for perfection, has become the greatest danger to his legacy.
In key moments, especially in the Champions League, he has dragged himself to the threshold of madness, where humanity’s capacity to think ends, where the gods take over, and in his obsession with purity, he has found a way to self-destruct.
When we were growing up as kids, our parents used to tell us that those guys with the highest intellect, had an element of madness, which accompanied them, they would say “vanopenga avo.”
They would tell us Hitler was a genius but he was also a mad man whose relentless quest to conquer the world exposed the madness in him.
This week, as part of my on-going research on what really makes Guardiola flirt on the edges of both genius and madness, I came across this piece on the website www.mysteries24.com.
“Creators and those mostly brilliant among them often suffer from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia,” the article reads.
“Scientists say it is due to the substance, dopamine. The brain reacts differently to dopamine, which functions very much in creative people and for people who suffer from mental illness.
“Experts believe that creative people obviously have no ability to filter the information — i.e. they lack what is specific to each person.
“This lack, however, helps to generate unique ideas and create unique masterpieces in art such as paintings, sculptures, symphonies.
“Lateral thinking is always accompanied by the absence of important components in the functioning of the brain system, explain Swedish scientists.”
Eric Cantona, for instance, was a football genius and, in a way, he was a rebel, who tested the edges of insanity, with the karate kick on a Crystal Palace fan just an example of his occasional flirtation with madness.
By the time he left French football for an adventure in England, Cantona had fallen out with just about everyone involved in the game, in his homeland.
The then national team coach, Henri Michel, had dropped him in favour of the emerging Zinedine Zidane and, in response, live on television, Cantona described the coach as a “bag of s**t.”
There is no doubt that Pep is a great coach, one of finest of his generation but he knows that his legacy will be tainted if, at the end of his coaching career, he has only two Champions League titles.
The two titles won at a time when Lionel Messi was unplayable, at the peak of his athletic powers, when the Spanish team, who had a huge chunk of Barcelona stars, were dominating the World Cup and the Euros.
When Xavi and Iniesta, two unique players who just happened to combine their powers for a single cause for both their club and country, were the magicians, pulling the strings, in the Barcelona midfield.
Pep was not hired by Bayern Munich to win them the Bundesliga, it’s probably a tournament they will even win without a coach on the bench because such is their dominance over their domestic rivals.
Bayern had won the Bundesliga 23 times by the time they hired Pep and, in the season he arrived, they had just been crowned champions of Europe.
It’s the Euro crown that they want, and it’s what they needed Pep to deliver but, in three full seasons in Bavaria, he failed to do so.
The embarrassing 3-5 home loss to Monaco, in 2017, after having won 3-1 in France, and even at Manchester City, Tottenham came to the Etihad and forced a 2-2 draw, to eliminate the Citizens, from the Champions League quarter-finals.
Two years ago, they were knocked out in the quarter-finals by Lyon and even when they reached the final against Chelsea last season, Pep’s team selection was so controversial he appeared to be experimenting in the biggest game of all.
For some strange reason, against a club with the dominant midfielder in the world at that time, N’golo Kante, Pep decided to go into battle with a team which didn’t have a defensive midfielder.
He has done well with City, winning league titles along the way, but this is something which Mancini also did and it’s something which Manuel Pellegrini also did.
At least, both Mancini and Pellegrini didn’t need to spend the US$1 billion, which Pep has splashed on players since his arrival at City, for them to be crowned champions of England.
It is what it is, if you ask me, I’m more interested in the result between Luton Town and Reading today because it could have a bearing on us having another player in the Premiership.
That’s what matters to me, more than anything else, these boys from the hood – Admiral Muskwe, Jordan Zemura, Marvelous Nakamba, Tivonge Rushesha, Tendayi Darikwa.
This week they made me proud.
To God Be The Glory!
Peace to the GEPA Chief, the Big Fish, George Norton, Daily Service, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and all the Chakariboys still in the struggle.
Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ronaldoooooooooooooooooooooo!
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