Kiglon praise Dhlakama

for assembling a competitive team during trying times for the club at the beginning of the year.
The Premiership club parted ways with Dhlakama and Muskwe on Monday, following a 1-5 hiding at the hands of CAPS United, and recruited nomadic coach Maxwell Takaendesa Jongwe for his second spell with the team.
Jongwe, who is also the Mighty Warriors’ technical adviser, is highly-rated in the country. There has been a lot of speculation, related to the changes made by Kiglon, with some suggesting that the club’s bosses decided to wield the axe because the coaches had failed to produce the results. But given that Kiglon virtually had no player, at the beginning of the season after most of their personnel, and coach, moved en-masse to Dynamos, such an argument would be hard to sell to the neutrals. Yesterday Kiglon chief executive Thomson Dondo reiterated that they parted ways with Dhlakama and Muskwe because of the differences between the two coaches and not the club’s results.
“We wish to put it on record, once again, that our decision to divorce ourselves from our marriage with Dhlakama and Muskwe had nothing to do with the results on the pitch,” said Dondo.
“It is our belief, as a club, that the two gentlemen have done remarkably well to try and build a team from scratch and we knew that it would be a huge challenge because we lost most of our good players at the end of last season.
“They worked very hard, to try and help the team, and we appreciate their efforts and we will always value their contribution.
“We will gladly challenge anyone who argues that Dhlakama is not a good coach and that Muskwe is not a good coach because we have worked with them, in a very difficult situation, and we know their quality.
“But when even the best coaches are not working as a team, because of serious differences between themselves, it ends up affecting the club and it’s on that basis that we rung the changes, nothing else, nothing more.
“We want Dhlakama and Muskwe not to be burdened by their association with us because the last thing we want is to here that they are being stalked by their failure at Kiglon because they didn’t fail.
“Maybe, when they work independently, far away from each other, their real qualities can once again come out.” Dondo said the door was still open at Kiglon for Dhlakama or Muskwe to one day come back to the club.
“The point is that Jongwe once left the team but where is he now? He is back with us and that is the nature of the game,” said Dondo.
“Tomorrow it will be either Dhlakama or Muskwe and it’s something that is normal in football and which doesn’t trigger a tsunami.
“They are not the first coaches to leave Kiglon because we once had Lloyd Mutasa and we also had Lloyd Chitembwe and the point is that we can still have any of those guys back one day because that is the way football is. “When we made our decision to change the coaches, it was never our intention to paint Dhlakama or Muskwe with a bad brush and we wish them well, in their future endeavours and we have a feeling they will be a success.
“We are not here to create enemies because running a football club in Zimbabwe is not an easy thing, it’s stressful because you are always looking for the money and, more often than not, the money is not there.
“So you can’t sacrifice your time, trying to get the money to run a club, just to try and make enemies. We want to make friends and those who leave the club, we want them to go knowing that we hold no endless curse for them.”