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It has been a bad week for Zimbabwe football — an international fixture being postponed at the last minute — after match officials failed to pitch up, an ugly wrangle between Zifa and the PSL over midweek fixtures and BancABC Sup8r Cup semi-final ties being scrapped. We find it extremely disappointing, really, that in this age and era, our national game should find itself being confronted by the kind of challenges that we saw unfolding this week and how football’s leadership appeared ill-equipped to deal with them.
So much has been said, and written, about how the Cameroonian match officials failed to fly into Harare in time for the start of our Chan final qualifier, first leg tie against Zambia last week and it is not our mission to try and find who was right and wrong in this madness.
What we couldn’t understand was how Zifa, fully aware that the match officials were not coming until way after the 3pm scheduled start of the game, went ahead and opened the gates for people to pay to get into the stadium and thereby creating all the confusion that we saw when the match was called off.
We expected Zifa to play a leadership role, once they had established that there were complications related to the travel schedule of the match officials, by using the radio stations to inform the fans about this and advise them to make a choice, whether to come to the stadium where there was a possibility the game could be called off, or stay at home.
To just leave the fans using their hard-earned money for transport from their homes to Rufaro, when our football leaders knew that this could be an unnecessary expense at a time when the possibility of the referees arriving had become very remote, was not only unfair but certainly very unprofessional for an organisation tasked with protecting their interests.
We have heard stories of some fans who threw away their tickets, once they had entered the stadium, and you can’t blame them for doing that when they were unlikely to use those tickets again, but found themselves being prejudiced, when tokens were issued by the association for use to enter Rufaro for tomorrow’s game.
Sadly, the postponement of that game triggered a host of problems for our national game and matters came to a head on Tuesday as Zifa and the PSL fought an ugly public battle with one party intent on making sure that no league fixtures would go ahead and the other adamant that the midweek fixture programme would proceed as scheduled.
Even the referees were drawn into this circus with threats being issued that Zifa, who have overall control of the match officials, would stop them from officiating in the midweek matches. Eventually, the two parties appeared to have struck a compromise and the midweek league programme proceeded as scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday.
While we appreciate the argument put forward by Zifa that having the midweek games was a disruption of the Warriors’ preparations for tomorrow’s game and the argument by the PSL that they also had a responsibility to their sponsors to keep their programme going, what we don’t understand was how their differences became a game that was played in the public gallery.
Once again we were left in no doubt that our football leaders have not learnt much from the numerous management courses they have been attending, around the world, because the way they keep taking their disputes to the media, washing a lot of their dirty linen in public, instead of finding solutions behind closed doors, continues to do more harm than good to the game.
With all due respect to Zifa, the Chan games are developmental and when you go to the official Fifa website today, you will see our fixture against the Zambians tomorrow under the category of friendly matches and it doesn’t sound right, does it, to freeze an entire league programme, for up to three weeks, because of a developmental tournament.
The players who play in the Chan games are all drawn from the domestic league and we couldn’t understand how such a game could cause so many problems, to the extent of sucking in the sponsors, the key stakeholders whom these players really need to keep pumping their money into the local game for their survival.
For a national game that badly needs the helping hand of corporate partners, we found it disturbing that it could even dare to try and antagonise the few sponsors who have chosen to remain faithful to our football and the fiasco over the midweek games was, at worst, a tragedy that should never be allowed to happen again.
Even the postponement of the BancABC Sup8r Cup semi-final ties, set for this weekend, after the hotel bookings had been made and transport arrangements organised, to pave way for the Chan game against Zambia, was not handled very well and has the potential of hurting the very sponsors that our national game should be guarding jealously.
After all, BancABC have just come back into the game, after suspending their knock-out tournament last year, and with the bank already the principal sponsors of both Dynamos and Highlanders, they are not the kind of sponsors that we should be trying to mess around with.
Online Reporter