Online Reporter
Tadious Manyepo
Zimpapers Sports Hub
TONDERAI NDIRAYA is cognisant of the failure by Premiership clubs to scout for prolific strikers who can illuminate the stadiums with goals on a regular basis but the Scottland coach believes that his side’s forward Tymon Machope is cut from a different cloth.
There has been a dearth of hitmen and foxes in the box in the elite league.
In fact, the top-flight has gone for 15 years without any single player breaching the late Norman Maroto’s 22-goal haul, attained in the 2010 season as the striker inspired the now defunct Gunners to the championship title.
With only three games before the curtain pulls down on the season, it is looking likely that yet another term will go by without any of the marksmen reaching 20 goals and let alone matching Maroto’s tally or breach the mark.
TelOne’s Washington Navaya leads the 2025 Golden Boot race with 16 goals and three ahead of Machope.
There are also three rounds of Premiership fixtures to play before the curtain on the league programme.
Ndiraya, however, believes Machope will score at least seven goals in Scottland’s last three games and reach the 20 goal mark.
“I can single out Tymon Machope, and by the way, he reached the target that we gave him last season at Simba Bhora.
“He has also reached the target we gave him by this stage of the marathon. He has 13 goals and that is exactly what we talked about.
“Now we have challenged him to reach the 20-goal mark. There are only three games remaining but I think it is still possible for him to reach that target.
“I know how he trains and how he plays. It is still very much possible for him to score at least seven goals in the last three games,’’ Ndiraya said.
Machope won’t have as much pressure as he used to carry going into the last three games where Scottland need only four points to win the championship.
Ndiraya knows the former Midway striker quite well after he scouted him in 2022 when he was still coaching Dynamos.
Machope could have joined the Glamour Boys but he was hesitant despite Ndiraya’s insistence.
But the big forward agreed to come on board at Simba Bhora during the mid-season window in 2023 when the Shamva outfit were under Ndiraya.
Machope scored seven goals in that campaign and notched 10 last year with his goals helping Simba Bhora win the league title.
And Ndiraya said it is forwards with the natural scoring instinct like the one that Machope carries that should be scouted and thrown into the league.
“I think scoring goals is a natural thing, because you can teach players to hold and pass the ball and all those tactical movements but you can’t teach them to score goals.
“If you do as we always try, that’s probably a smaller percentage. A large part of it is natural.
“You’ve got to have a natural instinct to score goals. And I think it’s all to do with our scouting from the development level and of course to the highest level.
“You want to scout a player that has the instinct of scoring goals, so you’ve got to do something with that at junior level.
“Then of course at senior level, it’s also to do with the scouting as well, as coaches also have to scout strikers who have got that natural instinct to score goals.
“Scouting was good back then as the development structures were there, and things were done right during that time.
“And it then churned out, the system churned out a lot of natural strikers with a natural instinct and that’s how we then saw that. I think the last player to score more than 20 goals was Norman Maroto in 2010.
“Yeah, you can look at him (MHSRIP) and how he was developed. Scouted by Dynamos, and he was very, very young, taken to school, Churchill Boys High, then integrated into the senior team, he was scoring for fun. So it’s about scouting more than anything else.”
Machope’s consistency in scoring goals at a level that he only got to compete in when he was already 29 is the reason why Ndiraya is advocating for scouting even in social and rural leagues for natural strikers.
Although his coach is backing him to score seven times in three games, matches have become close contests in this delicate stage of the season where Scottland’s opponents will also be looking to either fight relegation or secure a top-eight finish.
While it is not yet certain that Machope will reach at least 20 goals, what appears to be closer to his reach is a second successive championship title with a different club.
Machope has, however, remained grounded preferring to “see what happens in the last lap of the term’’.
With so many academies, why is Zimbabwe football standard declining so badly? The so called best players in the PSL are all in their 30s. It will be interesting to see if there will be any young player on the top 11 players this year.