adminSharuko On Saturday
ONE of our leading football writers, Henry Mhara, this week said the Warriors have been handed “WHAT APPEARS AN EASY DRAW” in their quest to end more than 10 years of wandering in the Nations Cup wilderness by qualifying for the 2017 AFCON finals.
Sikhumbuzo Moyo, who writes for our sister newspaper, Chronicle, called it a “SEEMINGLY FAIR DRAW,” Nigel Matongorere, writing for the Daily News, penned his story under the headline “TOUGH DRAW FOR WARRIORS” and warned that we need to be at our very best to emerge out of this group.
Grace Chingoma, our senior sportswriter, reminded us that Guinea has always been our BOGEY TEAM, drawing a chilling graphic of how we have struggled against the West Africans in the past, and how being pitted against them usually represents doom for us.
In a turbulent national game, whose soul has been battered so much in recent years, an Englishman even claims some people here have resorted to smoking “palm tree”, just to retain their senses, the sharp diversity of the views of our leading football writers, in their analysis of the draw, is probably something we should have expected.
Reading our football writers’ coverage, and reaction, to the 2017 Nations Cup draw, provided a throwback to a golden past for me — exactly 22 years ago — of the Warriors’ ’94 World Cup final round draw, when the Dream Team found themselves just four steps away from a place at the globe’s biggest football showcase.
Drowning in the euphoria of topping our group, beating every team that came to the National Sports Stadium, including Egypt, with record crowds in attendance, we had millions of Zimbabwean fans asking “Guinea Who?” when the draw was made.
That was, until our football heroes went to Conakry, and were hammered 0-3 by a Guinea team inspired by the immortal Titi Camara, who would later be good enough to play for Liverpool, in what was a shocking reality check for everyone in Zimbabwean football.
That game marked our first collision with Guinea and I still remember talking to a number of Dream Team members, who included John Phiri, now a ZIFA board member, on their return to Harare, and a lot of them were singing the same song that they had run into a quality team, whose pedigree had illuminated the contest, and who were worthy winners of that battle on the shores of the Atlantic.
We all saw that quality in the reverse fixture in Harare, which the Dream Team won 1-0, with Agent Sawu, of course, scoring the priceless goal, but Titi Camara was not only outstanding, but certainly unplayable, that afternoon he even managed to silence all of us, 60 000 screaming voices rooting for our Warriors, with an outrageous piece of dribbling skill.
Mercedes Sibanda remains a football legend of our time, and was the one fooled by Camara, who locked the ball between his dancing feet, somehow producing enough squeeze and movement to give it a flight and spin and then float it over our Rambo, our pillar of strength, our ultimate Warrior, leaving him motionless, as if frozen by both the beauty and brutality of the trick.
Since then, I have covered a number of confrontations between Guinea and Zimbabwe, I have been to Conakry twice, covered their participation at the ’98 Nations Cup finals, where they beat Algeria and drew against Cameroon, saw them at the 2004 Nations Cup finals in Tunisia, where they reached the quarter-finals, and saw them at the 2006 Afcon finals in Egypt, where they won all their three games to top a group that featured Tunisia, Zambia and South Africa.
I was there in Conakry when the Warriors held them to a goalless draw in a 2010 Nations Cup qualifier, watched the reverse game at Rufaro also end goalless, and then saw them win our group that also featured Kenya and Namibia and I watched them hold eventual champions Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Mali, in a tough group at the 2015 Nations Cup finals, where they qualified for the quarter-finals after lots were drawn.
When you have seen all this, you learn to give due respect — a lot of it — to your opponents and Guinea have shown, again and again over the years, that they are a force and there will never be a contest, in which we are paired against them, which I believe represents an easy assignment.
There will never be a draw, where the Warriors have to meet Guinea which, in my humble opinion, represents an easy ride for our national team and, for all the optimism that I have seen coming out of a number of quarters, I believe our 2017 Nations Cup campaign is just as tough as if we had been drawn in a group that featured Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana or Algeria.
The fixture is even hostile to our quest in that our last match, usually the game that matters, is away in Conakry against Guinea and, if you doubted that this was just like a journey back to ’93 for me, then this answers it, given that our final game, the decider, was against Cameroon in Yaounde before 85 000 fans at the Stade Ahmadou Ahidjo.
All that gamesmanship, those referees plucked from hell, that 1-3 defeat that shattered our World Cup dream, Reinhard Fabisch losing his cool and throwing US dollar notes at the match officials, in a graphic protest that they had been bought, the Indomitable Lions stealing our World Cup golden ticket to the United States where they were thrashed 1-6, in a group game, by Russia, to prove they didn’t deserve to be there.
WHEN YOU ARE 123RD IN THE WORLD, THERE IS NO EASY GROUP
The latest FIFA rankings tell us Guinea are the 41st most powerful football nation in the world and, when you are in those lofty heights, which was the case with our Dream Team that even went as high as 45th on the global table in those unforgettable ‘90s, you deserve a lot of respect.
Guinea are ranked even better than Nigeria (45), Cameroon (48), Egypt (51), the DRC (54), who finished third at the last Nations Cup finals, and Zambia (59th), who were champions of Africa just three years ago and have always provided a barometer, for football excellence, in Southern Africa.
Forget about the fact that Chipolopolo have never been to the World Cup, and Bafana Bafana have been there twice, because, if fate hadn’t been cruel to the Zambians, and not wiped away a generation of their finest footballers in that plane crash in ’93, they would have gone to the ’94 World Cup in the United States.
That they managed to assemble a team, out of the ashes of that tragedy, which came second at the ’94 Nations Cup finals and came within 90 minutes of qualifying for the ’94 World Cup, before losing in controversial fashion in the deciding match in Morocco, shows how much the Zambians have always been the torch-bearers in the region.
Guinea are the seventh most powerful football nation on the continent and you can’t doubt that, they were good enough to make it into the last eight of the last Nations Cup finals, and in three very tough group games against Cameroon, Mali and Cote d’Ivoire, in Equatorial Guinea, they just could not be beaten.
For a team, which was forced to play all its home matches in Morocco, because of the Ebola virus outbreak in their country, during the 2015 Nations Cup qualifiers, ending the qualifying campaign in second place, just a point behind group winners, and eventual tournament runners-up Ghana, was as impressive as it comes.
Pushed far away from home, because of the Ebola virus, Guinea picked seven out of a possible nine points in Morocco, beating Togo 2-1, drawing 1-1 against Ghana and beating a vastly-improving Uganda 2-0, and they went to Lome where they thrashed Togo 4-1 for the 10 points that were enough to give them a ticket to Equatorial Guinea.
Now, when you consider that this is the same tournament where we lost to Tanzania, in a preliminary round qualifier, against a background where we failed to win even just one of our six 2014 World Cup qualifiers — losing twice to Guinea in Harare and Conakry — I don’t see where this sudden bravado that we are in a group where our chances are bright is coming from.
REALITY SHOULD SHOW US THAT WE HAVE A MOUNTAIN TO CLIMB
For goodness sake, we are number 123 in the world, and when you are in such dumps, when you look above you and you see that Lesotho are even ranked higher than you, there isn’t any group that can be described as easy because just about everyone, and that includes Comoros and Seychelles, wants a piece of us and they can plunge into a game against you with high hopes they can win.
AFTER ALL, WE HAVEN’T WON IN OUR LAST NINE WORLD CUP/NATIONS CUP ASSIGNMENTS — OUR LAST WIN IN A GAME OF THIS MAGNITUDE CAME THREE YEARS AGO, ON SEPTEMBER 9, 2012, WHEN KHAMA BILLIAT INSPIRED US TO THAT 3-1 WIN OVER ANGOLA AT RUFARO — AND IN THE PROCESS WE HAVE LOST SIX AND DRAWN THREE OF THE MATCHES, WITH THE TWO DRAWS COMING AGAINST MOZAMBIQUE, OF COURSE, AND THE OTHER AGAINST TANZANIA.
It’s the worst run by the Warriors — at any level of their assignments — in their history.
Since March 2010, when the majority of the current ZIFA leadership came into office, the damning statistics will show that the national team has played 18 World Cup/Nations Cup matches and they have won just FOUR, all of the victories coming at home — against Burundi, Angola, Liberia and Mali.
We have lost NINE matches, which is half those games, including TWO in our backyard, we are WIN-LESS away from home, where we have lost SEVEN of the nine World Cup/Nations games we have played and we have been beaten by Tanzania and Burundi in the SEVEN away losses that we have suffered in NINE away World Cup/Nations Cup assignments.
The TWO draws we managed away from home were against Liberia, the Warriors’ first assignment under this regime at this level of the game before someone decided to destroy Norman Mapeza’s project, and Mozambique in that World Cup qualifier.
The Warriors have had more coaches than victories on the pitch, in a period of intense instability, where the national team has been dissolved twice now, once after that failed 2012 Nations Cup, and after the doomed 2015 Nations Cup bid but we haven’t seen the benefits, leaving some to suggest, with reason, that maybe the leadership should consider dissolving itself now.
We don’t know, just two months before the first game, who will be our coach and some of the voices from ZIFA have been saying that Callisto Pasuwa will take charge of the campaign but while the history-making former Dynamos coach proved himself at the Glamour Boys, and passed his home examination with distinctions, he remains a greenhorn on the continent.
He might be the best that we have around, on the domestic front, but we know he came short in the Champions League, with the Glamour Boys, and he never won a match away from home in three years, and there was that painful defeat in Lesotho against Correctional Services and those heavy defeats in North Africa against Esperance and CA Bizertin.
Rather than expose him into the firing line, wouldn’t it make sense that he serves his apprenticeship under a seasoned coach, who knows what it means to take on the giants on the continent, and after the 2017 Nations Cup, should we qualify, Pasuwa would then be ripe to take over, if he is the coach that ZIFA want for such huge assignments.
How a country that is coming from a failed experiment with a rookie coach, at this level of the game, feels the right thing would be to throw another greenhorn into the deep end, for even bigger assignments against seasoned campaigners like Guinea, defies the logic but, then, that is the way our football is.
Maybe, we derive a lot of joy in destroying our promising coaches, and our promising players, no wonder why the Englishman who has been working in our game, in the past two months, asked if we are smoking palm tree.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“We have to stop this fighting, especially the press and the mother body, and work in cohesion. We should let bygones be bygones for the interests of football. Some of us have a lot of talent and knowledge in football which should be used and we are not growing any younger,” — MOSES CHUNGA, former Zimbabwe skipper, in his reaction to the 2017 Afcon draw.
To God Be The Glory!
Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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