Loga out!

Dingilizwe Ntuli, Sports Editor
ZIFA finally gave in to reason and wielded the axe on clueless Warriors head coach Zdravko Logarušic after an executive committee meeting in Harare yesterday.

The Zifa statement announcing Logarušic’s sacking did not say much, maybe as a way of ducking its original blunder of thrusting the Croat at the helm of the Warriors’ technical set up.

“Zifa would like to inform the football fraternity and the nation at large that it has amicably parted ways with senior men’s coach Zdravko Logarušic. The decision was arrived at upon consideration by the full executive committee of all the various relevant circumstances pertaining to the coach’s contract. The entire technical team has also been disbanded,” read the Zifa statement announcing Logarušic’s sacking.

The Croat has a checkered history of promising so much yet achieving virtually nothing in every country he has coached on the African continent and even when questions were asked about the wisdom of appointing him head coach, Zifa defended him and declared he was the ideal man to lead the Warriors to the promised land.

However, Logarušic kicked dirt into the Zifa board’s eyes through his lacklustre tactics, team selection and tendency to blame the players and everyone else, but himself, for all drab performances the Warriors put up since his appointment in January last year.

Logarušic penned a two-year performance based and results show that he actually overstayed in the Warriors’ dugout, as he should have been shown the door a long time ago.

The Warriors won only one game out of 14 since Logarušic was appointed coach and the question is what performance was Zifa monitoring to justify his continued stay.

Logarušic led the Warriors through a dismal Chan campaign in Cameroon in January, losing all three group games to Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Mali.

Logarušic made headlines in this tournament, first for accusing Cameroon of witchcraft and then clownishly substituting Qadir Amini after just 139 seconds for taking a free-kick ahead of the team’s designated free kick taker Tatenda Tavengwa in a dead rubber against Mali.

Zifa failed to read the warning signs and defended him at every turn, justifying their faith in him after Zimbabwe qualified for the Afcon following a 1-0 win over Botswana in Francistown.

Truth be told, Zimbabwe’s qualification for the Afcon was premised on the four points the Warriors collected in a shock 2-1 win over Zambia in Lusaka and the goalless draw against Botswana in Harare under coach Joey Antipas.

After that 1-0 win over Botswanan and qualification for the Afcon, the Warriors matches have been painful to watch.

They went on to lose all three group matches in the Cosafa Cup, a tournament he should have used to prepare for the crunch World Cup qualifiers.

Instead, the Croat dismissed the Cosafa Cup and used it to give clubless players game to help them find teams, saying there was nothing much he could do since it’s not on the Fifa calendar.

Unfortunately for him, that poor showing in the Cosafa Cup followed the Warriors to the World Cup qualifiers against South Africa and Ethiopia.

The players looked confused against Bafana Bafana at the National Sports Stadium, Logarušic looked unbothered as he sat on the bench as if all was well.

It took the defeat to Ethiopia for Zifa to act, and embarrassingly so after one of its board members members Sugar Chagonda, who headed the Zimbabwe delegation to Ethiopia, broke ranks and wrote a letter calling for the disengagement of Logarušic.

Chagonda’s letter was proof that someone in the Zifa executive was protecting the Croat because there would have been no need for him to write a letter if a simple meeting could easily seal his fate.

One wonders what the Zifa Technical and Development Committee discussed after the Warriors’ shameless performances at the Cosafa Cup to give Logarušic more time to embarrass the country and anger football fans.

He should have been dismissed for the Cosafa Cup performance, but was instead given more time to ruin what had been a possible opportunity for the Warriors to advance to the next stage of the World Cup qualifiers.

At this point, one has to feel for Benjani Mwaruwari, whose start to his coaching career started on a terrible note after being roped in as a third assistant ahead of the game against South Africa.

Although Mwaruwari might be retained in the interim set up, this is not the start he would have wanted to a coaching career he has worked so hard for by attaining the Uefa A coaching badge in July.

The Warriors now face an acid test in back-to-back clashes with the Black Stars of Ghana in the World Cup qualifiers next month.

They have to collect at least four points from the two games to get their campaign back on track.

All this might not have been had Logarušic not been appointed in the first place.

Zifa says appointment of the interim technical staff is already in motion and that motion better be something that will placate local football lovers following the unforgivable Logarušic debacle.