Online Reporter
Sharuko On Saturday
IN March last year, on this blog, I wrote about Bernard Marriot and I said that after a decade in power, the Dynamos strongman was now a SYMBOL OF FAILURE.
I highlighted that he was 66, when he took over as board chairman on April 16, 2014, in what was effectively a boardroom coup.
That boardroom coup swept away Freddie Mkwesha, one of the finest gentlemen Dynamos has produced, and left him an embarrassed and broken man.
It was such a brutal type of elimination and, to be tossed away as an outcast really hurt Mkwesha badly and, just 20 months later, the first footballer from this country to be signed by a European club, was dead.
He was 74.
And, therefore Marriot, who is now 77, cannot argue that Mkwesha was now old and his time to finally rest had come.
At that age, one can only take so much when it comes to the kind of humiliation, and rejection, which Mkwesha suffered in that boardroom coup. When Marriot became board chairman he relegated Mkwesha to the non-existent post of advisor to the board, the closest thing to a Minister Without Portfolio, football has ever created.
Instead, the vice chairman’s post went to Shakie Matimbe, a guy who if you Google his name, you get just five links related to him, one of them being from the day the rebels staged their rebellion and grabbed power at DeMbare.
Matimbe probably broke a world record as the first vice chairman of a board at a club as big as Dynamos who said nothing, heard nothing and saw nothing related to the organisation he was said to be in charge of.
Owen Chandamale, who took over as the director in charge of finance just in name only because he didn’t even know who the Dynamos bankers were, died in December 2017 – just three years after the coup.
With all his colleagues dying around him, Marriot – who was between 14 and 15-years-old when the club was formed in 1963, which suggests that his claims to be a founder member are probably not true, was now fully in charge.
While Mkwesha and Richard Chiminya were unifiers, Marriot transformed himself into a ruthless and authoritarian emperor and came up with a scheme to transform the people’s team into his family’s ATM.
The brutal reality is that Marriot has absolutely no clue about what an owner of a football club should do, he has no capacity at all to run even a Sunday social league club and lives in a world where DeMbare’s failure to be champions is very normal.
He is the only man in the world with a 51 percent shareholding of a company whose other seven directors, who are supposed to have the other 49 percent, are ghost characters.
He is the only company director in the world who says he is having a board meeting when he is the only one in that meeting, talking to himself, interacting with ghost directors and, at the end of it all, issues a statement which ends with the phrase “by order of the board.”
He is the only club owner in the world who invests nothing, but gets everything from the team, including a tax-free monthly salary and a monthly DStv subscription.
He is the first Dynamos board chairman to be paid a salary and the first to also rope his children into various structures of the club where they also receive regular income.
THE DAMNING DEMBARE STATISTICS
But, the good thing about football is that results will always reflect the chaos in the administrative structures of a club and, in Dynamos’ case, Marriot’s kamikaze Stone Age model of leadership. And, the statistics paint a picture whose ugliness only Marriot and his family cannot see.
Well, here we go:
- Dynamos have not played a Champions League game since Marriot took over as board chairman in April 2014 with their last match coming a month before he became the boss.
- Under Mkwesha and Chiminya, in the five years leading to Marriot’s boardroom coup, DeMbare featured in the Champions League in five consecutive years – 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
- In 2008, under Chiminya’s leadership, Dynamos reached the semi-finals of the Champions League which means that, statistically that year, they were one of the best FOUR clubs on the continent.
- Now, under Marriot’s leadership, DeMbare have not only disappeared from the Champions League, but are, as of today, the 16th worst club in the domestic Premiership with just one win and a single goal, from one of their players, in 11 games.
- Dynamos have failed to win any of the EIGHT championships which they have competed in, with Marriot in charge, from the start of the campaign.
- FC Platinum became the dominant force in the decade Marriot has been in charge, with four league titles, and a comparison between them and DeMbare shows the rot at the Glamour Boys.
- In 2018, DeMbare finished 11th, 36 points behind FC Platinum, and in 2019, they finished ninth, 18 points behind the Zvishavane side. In those two seasons, Dynamos finished a combined 54 points behind FC Platinum.
- There was a 17-point gap between champions FC Platinum and Dynamos in 2022, which means that in just three seasons, the Glamour Boys finished a combined 71 points behind the Zvishavane side.
If this doesn’t provide evidence that Marriot has been dragging Dynamos closer to the mortuary and far away from the glory fields, where they belonged before his arrival, then nothing will.
He fires MaBlanyo and probably forgets that he did the same in April 2019 and while the coach went, came back and has gone again the results are still not changing and it’s the owner who is clearly the problem.
MARRIOT IS THE PROBLEM, EVERYTHING ELSE IS DRAMA
Nine coaches have come and gone at Dynamos under Marriot’s leadership, with MaBlanyo coming and going twice, but nothing has changed.
That some of these gaffers like Tonderai Ndiraya have gone on to win league titles elsewhere illustrates the point that it’s Marriot, and not the coaches, who is the problem.
Just for the record, the coaches who are in charge of the two teams that are top of our Premiership – Ndiraya and Lloyd Mutasa – are both Dynamos sons who were forced out of the club by Marriot.
Now, he brings in Saul Chaminuka, a lightweight appointment if you ask me, taking someone who was in charge of the team at number 18 on the table to try and revive a team which is on number 16.
Back in the days when I was a full-time sports reporter, when Dynamos was a proper team which belonged to the people, coaches like Saul – who is a good guy – would never be considered even to coach the club’s reserve side.
There were serious standards that were considered for one to coach DeMbare and that is why the likes of Sunday Chidzambwa, David Mandigora and Kallisto Pasuwa were recruited.
DeMbare didn’t gamble with coaches who were in charge of the club which was bottom-of-the-table, like what has happened now, who will spend the next six months trying to understand the culture at this team.
Maybe, that’s what Dynamos deserve now and, for me, if we needed confirmation that the Glamour Boys had become very ordinary, then Saul’s appointment confirmed that.
After all, this Dynamos team has won just one of their opening 11 league games and, in those 990 minutes only one of the players on their pay roll has scored a goal.
But, this is not new.
In June last year, I noted that Marriot was talking excitedly about DeMbare’s return to the Confederation Cup and suggesting this was a first major step in their revival.
I cautioned him in this blog using an analysis of their performance in the championship race in the first six months of the year.
I told Marriot that given his club had won just once in their last seven league matches then, with the win coming against a club playing for the first time in the top-flight league, the focus should not be on the return to the African tournaments.
I told him that given his club had failed to beat Chicken Inn, Ngezi, Herentals, FC Platinum and ZPC Kariba, in their last seven league matches, the focus should not be about potential battles against the likes of Zamalek, Esperance and TP Mazembe.
I told him that when his club needed a ghost goal, in the final minute, to beat a homeless Chegutu Pirates playing their first season in the Premier League, surely he should not be dreaming of continental glory.
I told him that when his club had picked just eight, out of a possible 21 points, in their last seven league matches, for a failure rate of 38 percent, in which 62 percent of value had been lost in a maze of mediocrity, he wasn’t supposed to be talking about the CAF competitions.
I told him that I saw the pathetic number of people sitting in Vietnam during the ZPC Kariba match and I told myself this just didn’t look like Dynamos.
I told him these are the things that Marriot should be fixing, trying to find how he can get the fans back to the stadium because Dynamos, without its crowd, was not DeMbare but DeMarriot. In one year, he did nothing and now he has to deal with the consequences as the fans, whom he has taken for granted for so long, are now demanding their club back.
And, they have a point – it’s their team, their heritage, and not the Marriot family’s ATM.
To God Be The Glory!
Peace to the GEPA Chief, the Big Fish, George Norton, Daily Service, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and all the Chakariboys in the struggle.
Come on Warriors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Khamaldinhoooooooooooooooooo!
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