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Noel Munzabwa, Sports Correspondent
THE so-called traditional Big Three of local football — Caps United, Dynamos and Highlanders — may have dominated Zimbabwe football and wilfully intimidated minnows with impunity with a collective 33 league titles since 1963, but their fiery reign faces serious threats from fast-emerging football giants.
Their dominance at one moment stretched to a longest and fruitful collective unfettered nine league titles in 10 years between 1993 to 2002. Although it remains unscathed by a distance, it is now three years away from being equalled and possibly broken. Unless something changes for the Big Three. Such has been the threat by dominating outfits such as Chicken Inn, FC Platinum, Manica Diamonds and Ngezi Platinum who wantonly refuse to be intimidated by the Big Three.
Last weekend, as the curtain came down on the 2023 Castle Lager Premier Soccer League season with Ngezi Platinum bagging the league title, the barren phase for the Zimbabwe Football Big Three — Caps United, Dynamos and Highlanders — reached a new and longest level.
By season count, the barren phase equalled the 48-year-old record of five seasons from 1971 to 1975, but then that particular period was eclipsed by Dynamos leagues in 1970 and 1976 and lasted only five years. In between, the league title went to Arcadia United (1971), Salisbury Sables (1972), Metal Box (1973), Highlanders (1974) and Chibuku (1975).
But by number of years, it’s been seven years — thanks to the global freezing pandemic the novel Coronavirus (Covid-19)-induced hiatus — since one of the Big Three tasted the league, that being Caps United in 2016, marking the longest ever barren window for Zimbabwe’s traditional football giants, raising credibility questions if the assertion still holds.
Since then, Zvishavane-based FC Platinum first broke the Bulawayo and Harare 50-year-old league title hold in 2017, since St Paul Musami’s 1966 victory. It was Pure Platinum’s lengthy fourth consecutive title in 2021/22 that then spelt the longest barren spell in years to equal to five then ultimately extended to six with newly crowned champions Ngezi Platinum further stretching it to seven.
Just maybe, the Big Three have been eroded to a mere term referring to the terrace numbers, but again, that could be highly subjective depending on the analysis drawing such conclusions by inference.
Bongani Ndlovu