It was a special Tuesday

Sikhumbuzo Moyo, Senior Sports Reporter
IT may have passed as any other ordinary Tuesday in the tough month of January.

For those into football, Tuesday January 18, will be remembered as the day that the Zimbabwe senior football team bowed out of the Africa Cup of Nations finals in Cameroon despite posting a 2-1 win over Guinea, who still progressed to the knockout stages of the tournament.

What, however, makes this day so special for the sporting fraternity is that three representative national teams in different sport codes made the country proud by posting crucial victories.

In Sri Lanka, our senior national cricket side, the Chevrons, stunned the hosts by turning on the tables in a one-day international series to win by 22 runs and level the three-match series ahead of the decider tomorrow.

Another team putting on national colours, the senior hockey squad, raised the national flag high at the Hockey Africa Cup finals in Ghana where they ran over Uganda 5-0 to get their campaign back on track after a shaky take-off in which they lost to South Africa 0-3.

The girls, whose discipline handed the country its first ever Olympic gold medal in 1980, take on Namibia tomorrow.

While the Warriors’ win might not mean much in as far as the Afcon tournament is concerned, it is in no doubt a much needed result as they had gone for 16 games without registering a win in all competitions.

The Warriors are currently ranked 132 on the world stage and 31 in Africa and beating a better ranked side comes with huge points on the rankings stable.

Tuesday will be like a solar eclipse, a rare occurrence for Zimbabwe’s representative sides in different disciplines, yet with proper and good administrative structures in all the national sports associations, what happened on Tuesday can be a frequent occurrence.