adminof that ward soon. Only last Sunday, confirmation was provided, in a manner that was both brutal and painful, that we won’t play at the next World Cup finals in Brazil and our quest to feature at the biggest football festival on the globe will have to wait for another five years.
The Pharaohs of Egypt came here and didn’t only win their first World Cup match in this country, but became the first team to score four goals, in either a World Cup or Nations Cup tie, against the Warriors in their backyard.
For the first time, since the group format of the World Cup qualifiers for the African Zone started ahead of Italia ’90, we have not won a game after four rounds of the matches with only one point to show for all our troubles.
The brand of the Warriors has taken a huge battering and one just needs to look at the way attendance figures have plummeted, whenever they play at home now, to see that there is something wrong with our football.
This is a national team that attracted a capacity crowd at Rufaro, just two years ago, when it hosted Mali for a 2012 Nations Cup qualifier, but now can hardly attract 20 000 people to come and cheer them at the giant stadium, in a World Cup qualifier, against record African champions Egypt.
And it’s not just the team’s lifeless show on the field that has become a huge cause for concern.
Zifa have never been angels when it comes to the way they conduct their business, and successive groups of football administrators have come on board the Zifa bandwagon, promising to make a huge difference, but eventually turning into a band of perennial failures.
But, even by Zifa’s appalling standards of football administration, the current board, which has been running the national game since March 2010, has taken the game to new levels of mediocrity and they must now rank as one of the worst leaderships to be given the mandate to manage our football.
For how can we explain the problems that the Warriors faced this week, in just trying to fulfil a 2014 World Cup qualifier in Guinea, without pointing the finger at the Zifa board for not only letting the team down but also letting down the entire football family that looks up to them for guidance and leadership?
The Warriors were scheduled to leave on Thursday, which made a lot of sense, given they would have arrived in Conakry yesterday, taken time to acclimatise to the humid conditions there, even done a light training session and then got enough time to rest before their final training session today.
It’s never an easy thing to travel in West Africa and former national team midfielder, Cephas Chimedza, highlighted that this week when he spoke about how they slept at the airport in Dakar, Senegal, during their trip for a World Cup qualifier in Conakry, Guinea, five years ago.
Now, if Chimedza thought that was bad enough, what about the current group of Warriors who failed to travel on Thursday, as scheduled, because the association didn’t have enough money to pay for their air tickets and the players and their coaching staff were only told, shortly before they left their hotel for the airport, that the trip had been rescheduled?
Zifa then announced that the team would leave yesterday but the association appears to have rushed to make an announcement, without confirming their capacity to raise funds to foot the bill, and yesterday came and went with the Warriors still stuck in Harare.
We then heard, late yesterday, that they were now scheduled to leave this morning but there were challenges, too, which should be expected when you do things at the last minute, and reports first emerged that only 14 people, 12 players, their head coach and team doctor, were guaranteed seats on the connection from Dakar to Conakry.
Then we were advised that 25 people would be on the flight.
Zifa knew, as early as last June when the first qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup were played on the continent, that the Warriors would this week be travelling to Guinea for this assignment but it appears our football leaders, as they always do, just went to sleep and forgot about it.
It’s an indictment on their leadership, that they should be trying to organise things, including complicated travel arrangements for a transcontinental trip across West Africa, at the very last minute and it’s a shame that such an important national assignment could be given so little consideration by the people we trusted to run our football affairs.
When the current Zifa leaders campaigned for their positions, one of the things they promised the football community was that such shambolic organisation of national team assignments would be a thing of the past.
The electorate took them on their word, hoping that better planning for national team assignments would also see the team’s preparations improving and, in due course, the results from the field will also begin to be positive.
But we find ourselves in a worse situation, in terms of our national teams, than what we were before the current Zifa board came into office and only last year we had that unfortunate situation where our national Under-17 and Under-20 teams failed to travel for their assignments in Angola and Congo-Brazzaville.
Online Reporter