adminThen, just like now, Zimbabwe played Lesotho, en-route to the final, with the Warriors scoring twice in that game four years ago and, given the way the football gods have turned around events in the game this year to be a carbon copy of 2009, there were two goals for the Zimbabweans on Wednesday.
Back in 2009, South Africa crashed out in the Cosafa Cup semi-finals, going down in a PENALTY SHOOTOUT to HOSTS Zimbabwe after a feisty encounter, with the Warriors finally managing to beat their neighbours 3-2 in the lottery.
On Wednesday, Bafana Bafana crashed out in the Cosafa Cup semi-finals, going down in a PENALTY SHOOTOUT to HOSTS Zambia after an explosive encounter, with Chipolopolo finally managing to beat their rivals 5-4 in a lottery.
It’s not just this Cosafa Cup that makes us all feel like the hands of time have been moved back, a good four years, and we are back in 2009, isn’t it, because the traces of what was happening then can be seen all over the show.
For goodness sake, the team that won the Fifa Confederations Cup in 2009, Brazil, is the same team that won the same competition this year when the Samba Boys overpowered world champions Spain one unforgettable night in the Maracana.
Back in 2009, in the final at Ellis Park in Johannesburg, Brazil scored three goals as they were crowned Fifa Confederations Cup winners and, in the final of the 2013 edition in the Maracana last month, the Samba Boys again scored three goals as they won the big tournament.
Then, just like now, the man that Brazil tasked to lead their attack had a name that started with the letter “F” – Fabiano in 2009 and Fred in 2013 – and, as fate would have it, they both scored twice in the final of the Fifa Confederations Cup and somehow there was a goal for either man, four years apart, in the 47th minute of the final game.
For some, 2009 was the year the music died, after iconic American singer Michael Jackson passed away, at the age of 50, for millions of teens around the globe, it was the year music started when their idol, Justin Bieber, released his platinum-selling debut seven-track album “My World”.
For some it was the year football started with Lionel Messi finally rising to be the best star in the game, by some distance, as he powered Barcelona to the Treble – Copa del Rey, La Liga and Champions League – scoring 38 goals and 18 assists, and winning the Ballon d’Or on December 1, 2009.
Four years down the line, Messi is still the King of the Game, Spain are still the Kings of Europe, Brazil are still the Kings of the Fifa Confederations Cup and, of course, mighty Zimbabwe are still the Kings of the Cosafa Senior Challenge Cup.
Today, the Warriors march into the Levy Mwanawasa Stadium hoping to do what the Zambians failed to do when the two rivals met in the last Cosafa Cup final at Rufaro in 2009 – beating the hosts in their backyard, leaving the home fans utterly disappointed and taking the trophy across the Zambezi for celebrations on the other side of the mighty river that bonds us as brothers and sisters.
Sunday Chidzambwa and his men made it look so easy, in that final in 2009 before a capacity crowd of 35 000 that included President Mugabe, as Nyasha Mushekwi, thrown into the deep end by his coach despite injury concerns that had forced him to miss the semi-final, exploded with a spectacular display of marksmanship.
Mushekwi scored twice, including a bullet header that had Rufaro on its feet the moment that ball flew off his head, while his strike partner, Cuthbert Malajila, scored the other goal as the Warriors reserved their best for last and punched Zambia into submission where it mattered most.
A true Warriors fan will tell you that while all victories taste sweet, those that come against Zambia and South Africa taste even sweeter because these have traditionally been the countries that we call our opponents, the teams that we play our international derby against – the Battle of Zambezi and the Battle of Limpopo.
We admire the Zambians for the value they have given their football, we privately yearn for our own Kalusha Bwalya, the superstar footballer who comes back from years in Europe to lead his country’s football fraternity to the Promised Land of a Nations Cup success story, and we celebrated with them when they became champions of Africa.
But we have never considered ourselves inferior to our Zambian counterparts, when it comes to football, we have always felt we are just as good as them, if not better, and our differences are found in the lucky breaks, they have had a lot of them and we haven’t had any, and therein lies our difference.
We back our arguments with fact and say that during the 1994 Nations Cup qualifiers, neither them nor us, were able to win any of the two matches played in Lusaka and in Harare with both games ending in draws and, over 180 minutes, it’s a good indicator that there was very little between us in terms of the strengths of our national teams.
But they went to the 1994 Nations Cup finals, at our expense, when the hand of fate played its biggest intervention ever, in the history of football, and Kalusha Bwalya scored – for the first and last time in his international career – with a header, which came quite late in the game, and there was no time for us to recover.
As we left the National Sports Stadium, with our heads down, our spirits shattered, our morale battered, we cursed fate, not our gallant boys in the Dream Team who had done everything but win this match, and we cursed that post, which had somehow denied us, when a 2-0 lead would have all but ended this as a contest and taken us, not Zambia, to Tunisia ’94.
Our fate ended up being determined by just the width of the post, and these are small but significant margins of difference, if the ball had kissed the other side, it would have been game over – but it didn’t and they survived to launch one attack from which they were rewarded in a manner they had never seen before.
And, a team that couldn’t beat us home and away in the qualifiers, that needed a rare Kalusha header to steal a point from Harare that opened their path for a light to Tunisia, went all the way to the final of the ’94 Nations Cup and, as we watched from home, we could only curse our fate.
It’s all that, and much more, which has created this intense rivalry between us and the Zambians and it hasn’t been helped by some idiots from that side, including that fellow who took to Facebook to tell us that we were crazy people to join them in celebrating their Nations Cup success story.
Yes, this is just a Cosafa Cup game and it doesn’t really feature the cream of the two nations, at best it’s just a battle of the good players who can be found in either country’s top-flight league, but because it’s Zambia versus Us, it carries its weight in gold, its mass in diamonds and, suddenly, it has this special attachment to it.
Amid The Outpouring Of Patriotism We Need A Reality Check
Admittedly, our success in the Cosafa Cup this afternoon, if we manage to win it, will not suddenly erase the grim reality that we have had a World Cup qualifying campaign plucked from hell – our worst in 33 years as an Independent nation, with no victory after five games and just one point on the board.
Neither will a victory in Ndola today suddenly cover up for the failings that have dogged our 2014 World Cup campaign, the majority of them man-made, which have reduced our proud Warriors from a group of troops who had turned their home into a fortress into a group that is now powerless to defend its home territory the Pharaohs can come here and score four times in a spectacular destruction.
A success story in Zambia this afternoon will not quickly make up for all the emotional stress that our fans have endured, in a quest to play in Brazil that never shifted into second gear, and is yet to produce even a single win for us, after 450 minutes of action, leaving them with nothing but just the sorry sight of a wreckage of a dream that twisted into a nightmare.
Winning in Ndola today won’t suddenly make up for the fact that a whole generation of our teenage footballers might grow up never playing in the African Under-17 and Under-20 championships because, somewhere along the line, we failed to send our national teams to away assignments and it’s inevitable that we will be banned from the tournaments.
Serious football nations do not include success at such tournaments like Cosafa as part of their blueprint, for a successful tomorrow, but use the opportunities offered by such a tourney to develop their emerging talent and to expose those players who are on the fringes to the challenges of international football.
Their mission, always, is to do well in the tournaments that matter and if you are in Africa then that’s the Nations Cup and the World Cup and they also invest a lot of resources into their junior development programmes so that they continue producing players who can compete well in the African Youth Championships and get a crack to play at the Fifa Under-17 and Under-20 World Cup.
The last time we won the Cosafa Cup, in 2009, it didn’t suddenly open our doors for a regular participation at the Nations Cup finals and it’s a fair call to say that, four years down the line, we are far worse off, in terms of our competitiveness, our world ranking, our ranking on the continent, than we where when we lifted the regional tourney.
Statistics don’t lie and the numbers will show that, even in our World Cup campaigns going back to the first one, as an Independent nation in 1980, we have never had it this bad in terms of trying to book a place at the globe’s greatest football festival.
But our current predicament, where we are bottom of the barrel, is what makes today’s game very special and why a victory, in this final, will blow a refreshing breeze into a national game that is crying out for a ray of light to break through the dark cloud that has hovered above it all this time, plunging it into a state of darkness.
The mere fact that we are down and out, right at the basement, is what makes this Cosafa Cup final very special because it will bring back that feel-good factor, which our national game badly wants, and the international and regional media coverage of our Warriors will have a positive spin to it, because they are champions again, rather than the negativity of all the controversy that has stalked them.
The very fact that we are doomed right now, trapped right at the bottom of the pile, is what makes this contest today very special because if the boys can do it, it will bring back this wave of confidence, that for all the challenges that have stalked our national game in recent years, we can still compete and win, forget about the fact that it’s still just a regional tournament.
The mere fact that it’s the Zambians we are playing, in their backyard for that matter, makes this game very special and if we can win it, and show them that thrashing them here four years ago wasn’t just a fluke, then we would have done a lot of wonders for our national game that is crying out for such a regular dosage of positive results.
There has to be a starting point, in terms of our national team being cast in positive light, and if they can win this final today, irrespective of the fact this is just a Cosafa Cup tie and this is just a group of home-based Zambian players who will be nowhere near the picture when the real Chipolopolo are called into action, it will provide that new beginning for us.
We all feel Ronald “Rooney” Chitiyo will play a big part in the future of our Warriors and if he can get that winning feeling into him today, that confidence that he can be part of a team that wins tournaments, including those played in foreign lands, then we are doing wonders for our tomorrow.
It’s not about Rooney alone.
It’s also about Devon Chafa, the player I believe, in my little book, will make the biggest impact, in terms of success as both an international, and a professional in foreign lands, among his current generation, because he is a natural and his development, in the past year, has been phenomenal and the more confident he becomes the more his quality will shine.
It’s also about Tendai Ndoro, the rangy forward who drew back the hands of time on Wednesday, with a powerful display of predatory instincts that we last saw some 20 years back when Agent Sawu was the man we could count on, to get us the goals, and now and again he would deliver with chilling accuracy.
It’s also about Silas Songani, Hardlife Zvirekwi, Eric Chipeta, who just turned 23 last month, and if we can pick four or five players from this group, and they play a part in our Warriors’ adventure in the future, then it will be an exercise that was worth the celebrations that will follow our success.
Pagels, Tiki-Taka And This Campaign
A close look at the Warriors, in their adventure in Zambia, shows that they only played tiki-taka, the brand favoured by their outgoing coach Pagels, for just 45 minutes, in that first half against Malawi when their football was so good it appealed even to their opponents.
But for all our lovely touches, the reality was that our only goal, in that match, came from a dead ball, a free-kick lofted into the penalty area, the confusion it triggered and Masimba Mambare reacting well to bundle the ball home.
Most of the time, when we sprayed the ball around with beautiful one-touches, we never threatened our opponents, the majority of the phases of play were either in our half or just before the attacking third and all that Malawi would do was just sit back, watch us thread the passes, and wait for us to come into the danger zone.
Incredibly, when the Malawians lost one man, sent off in the first half, we also lost our way and tiki-taka never flowed in the second half, we appeared a completely different team altogether and we flirted with danger, leading to that howler by our ‘keeper that gave the Flames a lifeline.
The challenge of tiki-taka, from what I observed in that game against Malawi, is that our boys and our coaches didn’t have a Plan B, when the opposition had found a way to play us now that they were committing themselves more to every phase of play having gone a man down, and we lost our shape, clutched to straws, like drowning individuals, and were on the back foot throughout.
But, then, our coach is doing this for the first time, it’s his first experiment with this system at this level of the game and, until that game against Malawi, he had never experienced a game-situation where his Plan A would fail, in the second half playing against 10-men, and that he couldn’t respond was because he had never faced such a scenario before.
Against Lesotho, in the semi-final, there was no tiki-taka throughout the 90 minutes, and Pagels has conceded that the team didn’t play well but just did enough to beat Lesotho, which we should always do, especially when you consider that the same team conceded 11 goals, on its two away 2014 World Cup games, against Zambia and Ghana.
Pagels is a good man, a very good man, and the more that I have seen him endure the torture of his team’s trials and tribulations in Zambia, the more that I have drawn closer to him and I have to say that it’s sad that he is leaving because, in terms of football development, we could have used this man to shape our game from grassroots.
I have my questions about Pagels the national coach, and even if he wins the Cosafa Cup today, it won’t change that because the Nations Cup and World Cup assignments are different beasts to Cosafa.
Angola sent their Under-23 team to Zambia, Gordon Igesund was barred from picking the best Kaizer Chiefs players and all players from Orlando Pirates in his Bafana Bafana team, and to their credit, his makeshift team took Zambia all the way and were unlucky to lose that semi-final.
It’s hard to read anything, of substance, from this Cosafa Cup, even if we win it today, but what we can’t take away from such a success story is that it will usher in a breeze of goodwill into our game and God knows how much we badly need that.
To God Be The Glory!
Come on Warriors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rooneyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
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