adminrobe that we have dressed him with.
The bulk of the material, which pops up on your screen, has to do with Zimbabwe and his time with the Warriors, as if this guy didn’t have a football life before his arrival here as a development expert, specialising in women’s football.
Pagels isn’t a young man, like Partson Ndabambi, trying to find a way in the jungles of football coaching. He is a 63-year-old man, and if, indeed, he has been in football all his life, as some might want us to believe, then he should have loads of stuff about him on Google.
He is a just a year older than Vicente del Bosque.
But if you google the Spaniard you get loads of stuff about his romantic flirtation with football, which started as a 19-year-old player at Plus Ultra, his lengthy service at Real Madrid, how he returned there as a coach in ’94 right up to this day when he is a World Cup and European Cup winner with Spain.
Pagels’ story isn’t captured on Google and you can’t read about him on Wikipedia because, until his arrival here two years ago, the German coach lived far away from the fast lane of world football and in a comfort zone where newspapers didn’t stalk him for his comments or photographers followed him for his pictures.
You don’t see images of a youthful Pagels on the internet because when he was young, he was divorced from the public life of football, and all the publicity baggage it carries, and he only plunged into it when he accepted the offer to be the interim coach of the Warriors last year.
Pagels is virtually a ghost character, if you try to track his life in football before he came to this country, someone that the game didn’t know, outside his hometown of Stade in Germany, someone that George Mbwando had never heard of, despite spending the last 15 years of his life involved in football in that European country.
But Pagels has a traceable football history now, thanks to his flirtation with the Warriors, and he has three World Cup matches under his belt, all of them losses, he has three World Cup goals under his belt, two of them scored by Knowledge Musona, and his team has conceded seven World Cup goals.
Today, those who keep track of what people do in their public life, and store it on the internet, will add that Pagels also took charge of a Cosafa Senior Challenge Cup match, in Lusaka, against Malawi and, hopefully, his charges will win this game to give a little bit of gloss to the gloomy statistics you see linked to the German’s coaching profile on the web.
It’s Pagels’ final assignment in his rather short tour of duty in this country and we all pray that he ends it all, with a little bit of success so that we just don’t remember him as that coach who failed to win even one game, in our chaotic campaign to try and reach the 2014 World Cup finals in Germany.
While Pagels has charmed me with the vision that he has, the flowing and beautiful football that he wants his team to play and, refreshingly, his honesty when it comes to dealing with issues related to his job, my main concern has been the fact that he is clearly out of depth with football at this level because he has never swum in such waters before.
Everything for him is a FIRST in this journey – FIRST friendly international in charge of a national football team when we played Botswana, FIRST World Cup assignment in charge of a national football team when we played Egypt in Alexandria, FIRST home game in charge of a national football team when we hosted the Pharaohs, FIRST trip to West Africa in charge of a national football team when we went to Guinea.
Today, it’s a FIRST, too, for him – FIRST Cosafa Cup game in charge of a national football team.
All this at the age of 63, and that’s what puzzles me, and triggers all the questions about what he was doing all along, and if he wasn’t good enough to take charge of the
Faroe Islands, probably the weakest national football team in Europe, are we right to invest all our trust in a man whose every step is experimental because he has never done that before?
The Warriors are the defending Cosafa Cup champions but that last success story was penned four years ago when we still had the luxury of fielding the likes of Nyasha Mushekwi, scorer of a double in the final against Zambia, Cuthbert Malajila, Chris Samakweri and Method Mwanjali for duty in the regional tournament.
We all want the Warriors to win the Cosafa Cup and they have a good chance, especially after Bafana Bafana coach Gordon Igesund was forced to drop all the Kaizer Chiefs’ championship-winning players from his team, but even such a success story shouldn’t suddenly make Pagels a very special coach.
As far as I know, no one said Sunday and Misheck Chidzambwa and Charles Mhlauri were special coaches, even after they won the regional title, with Mhofu and Charlie even going a step further by taking us to the Nations Cup finals and doing far much better, in the World Cup campaigns they were involved in, than Pagels’ record.
From The World Cup Show To A School Sports Teacher
Pagels revealed this week that he has secured a job, back home in Germany, starting on August 6, where he will be the sports teacher at a school in his hometown of Stade and the six-month contract has been signed and sealed.
It’s here where I get confused.
Maybe I’m lost, and that’s expected in us as humans, but why am I getting the impression that the coach we tasked with rescuing our 2014 World Cup campaign, after it had started badly with a loss and a draw, is only good enough, when he goes back home to Germany, to work as a sports teacher at a school?
The last time I checked, the Brazilian coach that South Africa had tasked with guiding their 2010 World Cup team, Carlos Alberto Parreira, is back home in Brazil but such is his pedigree that he is not teaching sports, at a school in Rio de Janeiro, but is now the technical director of the national team, working hand-in-glove with national coach Felipe Scolari that he even sits on the bench.
Now, if the man we tasked with trying to take us to Brazil, where there was a possibility in the event that we had made it, of meeting Germany in one of the games, is not even valued in his own country to the extent that, on his return home from a tour of duty in Africa he is handed a role as a sports teacher at a school, doesn’t this show that we got it wrong somehow?
Reinhard Fabisch didn’t leave Zimbabwe, after all the highlights of his Dream Team, to surface at a school in Germany where he was employed as a sports teacher because his pedigree, his exceptional qualities as a coach, meant that he had long moved away from the life of earning a living coaching school kids how to play football.
Even poor Rudi Gutendorf, who was a clueless 70-year-old German coach when he arrived here to guide the Warriors, did not return to a life as a sports teacher, at a school, when his short and fruitless stay here ended, but for all his technical shortcomings, coupled with his advancing age, he got jobs to coach Mauritius, Rwanda, Samoa, Iran and even the Chinese Olympic team.
Even Tom Saintfiet, for all the horror that he faced here in being deported when he tried to coach without a work permit after being recruited in a process that was at best, a joke, and at worst, a gigantic fraud in that he was offered the job before others who had applied had been interviewed, got jobs to coach Ethiopia, Jordan and Young Africans of Tanzania.
Today, we will face Tom as he tries to hit back at us, for all that he endured, when the Warriors take on the Flames of Malawi.
You can’t plunge from coaching a World Cup team to coaching kids at school unless there is something significantly wrong with your CV, in terms of getting you a similar job of coaching a national team elsewhere, or unless we were wrong to dress you with borrowed robes when we gave you a task, for a World Cup dance, that was way beyond your capacity.
I would have expected Pagels to coach one of the teams in the Bundesliga, if he insists it’s time to go back home and retire, and that would have given us an indication of his quality, that he was qualified to coach the Warriors, but to see him sign a six-month deal, to take charge of sports at a school, is ridiculous and paints the true picture of where our coach stands.
Pagels is not in any way different, really, from Bekhi Nyoni, who has dedicated his life to teaching football to school kids, something that he has done with distinction at St George’s and at BN Academy when the boys are on holiday, and if we can settle for the German to coach our national team, then we should also be prepared to see Bekhi moving out of his chair, as a football pundit on ZBC, and also coaching the Warriors.
Our German coach is not in any way different, really, from the scores of coaches who have taken their school teams to Mutare for the Copa Coca-Cola football festival this weekend, coaches like Gift Zvavanhu of Churchill, and maybe, rather than weigh him down the load of delivering a Cosafa Cup crown, we should have just let Pagels go to Mutare where he would have felt really comfortable.
Just spare a moment and think about all those teachers, who used to teach us PE at school back in the days, then you have someone closer to Pagels and the only difference is that the German got a lucky break, to end up as high as national coach of Zimbabwe, while those poor folks, sadly, never got such a break even when they virtually have the same CV.
I hope Pagels will do well in Zambia, he has a bunch of boys who can help him do that and defend our title, but that is a long shot because one gets a feeling there is something wrong about our coach’s judgment and if he can’t be trusted to do the simple thing, of getting the right man to captain his Warriors, somehow choosing a Denver Mukamba who wasn’t good enough to play in his first XI against Egypt, investing so much hope in him could be risky.
He can win the Cosafa Cup, fair and fine, but when we turn into a nation that believes winning this tournament represents success, when both Orlando Pirates and Chiefs have withheld their players from the Bafana Bafana team, when even Mozambique can’t be allowed by Sundowns to use Elias Pelembe, then we are getting our priorities wrong somewhere.
I agree with those who say that we should drop this habit of changing coaches all the time and continuity is important but mistakes have to be corrected, as quickly as possible, and the engagement of Pagels as national coach was a huge mistake because, rather than deploying him into the hot spot of Lusaka, he should have been in Mutare this weekend for the Copa Coca-Cola finals.
Pagels says he is leaving when this tournament ends and, since we have no major matches until the end of the year, save for a dead rubber World Cup and a CHAN assignment, we could use this window to really sort out the coaching department of our Warriors and give them a light, the way Scolari has illuminated the Samba Boys, and we can face the future with hope.
As Musona Takes Steps Backwards, Bony Keeps Rising
In September 2011, Fifa unveiled a list of XI emerging African football stars it tipped to take the world by storm and it featured Zimbabwe’s talisman, Knowledge Musona, and highly-rated South African forward Thulani Serero.
Others tipped by Fifa included Moussa Sow of Senegal, James Obi of Nigera, Moussa Maazou of Niger, Yousef Al Arabi of Morocco, Cheikh Diabate of Mali, Jordan Ayew of Ghana, Wilfried Bony of Cote d’Ivoire and Congolese star Delvin Ndinga.
Exactly two years down the line, Musona finds himself back at Kaizer Chiefs, after struggling to make an impression in Germany for two years, and in the week that the Amakhosi confirmed the return of our talisman, Ivorian striker Bony moved from Vitesse Arnhem in Holland to Swansea in the English Premiership for a club record fee of £12 million.
Bony, who scored 37 goals in 36 appearances for the Dutch side last season, is just two years older than Musona and his professional career in Europe, which started in the backwaters of the Czech Republic league, paints a graph that is on the rise.
Bony didn’t start at the very top, he went for trials at Liverpool in 2007 and was told that he wasn’t good enough, and he retreated to the Czech Republic where he adjusted to the challenge of playing in Europe, without a lot of pressure being exerted on him, and six years down the line, he has arrived in the English Premiership.
I’m not so sure if Musona’s agent was right to send his player into a league that was becoming the best in Europe, to play for a club that was struggling just to survive in that league, and where coaches were being changed here and there.
From day one he was played way out of position, wide on the right as a winger, the role that Benjamin Marere used to play in the days of Mwana Africa, and he was told that positional discipline was key and he needed to track back, as much as possible, to help the right back in defence.
His confidence suffered terribly and while he kept exploding, in the Warriors’ colours where he felt loved and played in a role that he wanted and which suited him best, he was horrible in the Bundesliga and, soon, he began to even doubt himself.
Musona’s return to Chiefs is good news for the Amakhosi fans because, in a comfort zone where he will play against defenders of a questionable pedigree and playing the role that he wants, he is likely to score a lot of goals.
But, for us who look at the bigger picture given the key role that he plays for our Warriors, Musona’s return to Chiefs is a disaster because this would be another season wasted, even if he comes out as the best player in the circus on the other side of the Limpopo, because he is gaining nothing from playing in that retirement zone.
I have always told myself that Musona is a better football talent than Benjani and he hasn’t suffered the kind of injuries that stalked the Undertaker but Benjie was driven by a raw spirit to succeed as a professional footballer, and this ensured that his career in Europe went full circle.
Maybe we only need to look at the difference, in career paths, between our best player, Musona, and Bony, the man the Ivorians believe is the long-term replacement of Didier Drogba, to see why we are so worlds apart in this game and the Elephants are top of their World Cup group and the Warriors are bottom.
All Hell Breaks Loose In Bulawayo
The two Harare giants, Dynamos and CAPS United, were in the City of Kings last weekend and returned home feeling they had been given a raw deal, by the match officials, with their fans raining missiles on the pitch in both matches.
The Green Machine felt they deserved a penalty, which was given and then taken away from them in a chaos of decisions that were made and changed by the match officials, as another big game was marred by controversy.
Highlanders were right to feel aggrieved, when Dynamos scored a late equaliser at Rufaro and CAPS United’s winner at the National Sports Stadium came from a Leonard Fiyado who had strayed offside, and while referees can miss close-call offside calls, they have a duty to get them right in big games.
But if the events in Bulawayo last weekend were influenced by a mission to make up for everything that Bosso feel was taken away from them, in two highly-charged matches in the capital, then we have lost the plot because there is no way that two wrongs will ever make a right.
Interestingly, for all the battering that Norman Matemera received for his time management at Rufaro in the DeMbare/Bosso game, he is just one of two local referees who passed the test to handle matches at the Cosafa Cup.
Thirteen years ago we lost 13 fans at the National Sports Stadium in a stampede and, given what we saw in Bulawayo last weekend, the missiles, the attacks on visiting fans, we can say that we are yet to learn the full lessons of what crowd trouble can do to us.
Please, Mr Referee, all the fans are asking for is just the spirit of Fair Play – nothing more, nothing less.
To God Be The Glory
Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicharitooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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