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Dynamos are scheduled to fly out to Tunis to face 1988 African Cup Winners Cup champions Club Bizertein in a first leg encounter on Sunday.
The Harare giants, who overcame Lesotho Correctional Services 3-1 on aggregate in a preliminary round tie, had tentatively set tomorrow as their date of departure for Tunisia.
Complications that have arisen in terms of the flights they are looking at using, are now pausing a headache to Dynamos and might force them to leave Harare on Thursday.
Dynamos team manager Richard Chihoro said yesterday that their match against CAB had now been set for Sunday afternoon in Tunisia while the next available flight on which the Glamour Boys delegation can get seats to return home is on Tuesday.
Chihoro said such a scenario also meant that Dynamos would have exceeded the five-day stipulation which the Confederation of African Football gives to the host teams to cater for their visitors.
The Dynamos team manager said had the match gone ahead on a Saturday as they had earlier been made to believe, it would have meant that DeMbare would fly out of Tunisia the next day without having to worry about how to handle the issue of the mandatory five days’ stay in the North African country.
Chihoro, however, said they were not pressing a panic button over the travel arrangements as their management committee was “now seized with the matter and working out the best possible way out of this puzzle for us’’.
The Dynamos team manager insisted that their technical department, players and the executive were keen to avoid a repeat of their nightmarish trip to Maseru in which Dynamos not only lost the reverse fixture1-0 but also found themselves stranded in the Lesotho capital, missing their flight back home via Johannesburg.
Earlier allegations had been that the Dynamos delegation missed their flight while still haggling for lunch at the hotel they were staying.
The team, however, disputed those claims amid a flurry of accusations that club vice-chairman Webster Chikengezha, who was in charge of their travel arrangements, had abandoned the delegation.
This led the players to petition the Dynamos board of directors demanding that he be relieved of his duties.
Chikengezha has also been doubling up as the Dynamos secretary-general since the start of the year following the resignation of Raymond Kazembe.
The Dynamos board has since leapt to Chikengezha’s defence and moved in to quell tensions citing “communication breakdown’’ for the embarrassment that the Glamour Boys endured in Maseru where they later had to be housed at a hostel owned by the Lesotho Football Association.
Dynamos also suffered the ignominy of having to travel in three batches after they missed their original fight.
But Chihoro, an assistant coach to David “Yogi’’ Mandigora in 2008, when Dynamos defied odds to reach the Champions League semi-final, maintained that they were facing challenges with the availability of an earlier flight out of Tunisia.
“From a technical point of view, everything is under control at the moment and we are working together very well to ensure there is no repeat of what happened in Lesotho.
“Of course, it is absolutely untrue that the team missed the flight because they were at the hotel demanding lunch.
“There is no way we could have missed a chance to come home early while waiting for lunch when the same lunch is served on the plane and in any case we could have still bought lunch at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg.
“There was communication breakdown, but what happened there is now water under the bridge and we have all learnt from those mistakes.
“Our challenge now lies on how we can deal with the issue of the flights out of Tunisia.
“Our preferred flight on Monday is said to be fully booked and the only other earlier flight leaves Tunis at 2:30pm on Sunday by which time we will actually be warming to play the game because our match is in the afternoon.
“So, if we leave Harare via Dubai on Wednesday we will arrive in Tunis on Thursday and the issue that our executive is discussing at the moment is how to deal with the extra day we would have to spend in Tunisia in the event that our opponents insist on catering for us only within the five days that are stipulated by Caf,’’ Chihoro said.
While Chihoro’s worry was on the best possible travel arrangements available to the DeMbare delegation, coach Callisto Pasuwa was still seeing red about the Premier Soccer League’s decision to bar his team from playing a friendly match, ostensibly to avoid a counter attraction with the NetOne Charity Shield that was taking place in Zvishavane.
Pasuwa had first arranged a game against Mutare army side Buffaloes at Rudhaka in Marondera before the PSL refused to sanction that match.
Even a late bid to arrange another warm-up match against Harare City in the capital failed to materialise allegedly on the same grounds and the PSL maintained that they would not allow licensed referees to handle that game as that would make it an official match.
“I thought by playing in the Champions League we are not only doing it for the Dynamos family, but the whole of Zimbabwe and that we would get everyone’s support,” said Pasuwa.
“Some of our players are still lacking match fitness and we thought maybe we could use the game against Buffaloes to see if the weaknesses that were exposed in Lesotho are still there.
“But our football authorities in the league had their own ideas and in the end we had to make do with just a practice session on our own.”
Although the Charity Shield is a noble idea, the PSL’s decision not to sanction the Dynamos’ friendly appeared to heighten tensions between the Harare giants and the league’s chiefs with the DeMbare family questioning why the top-flight body did not consider that they had an international assignment which should have been given precedence over any other domestic match.
Dynamos and the PSL’s relations have of late been strained following the champions’ threat to boycott the Charity Shield until they were paid their prize money from last year’s competition.
Online Reporter