The pain of Cape Verde

week in October last year, where the sum total of Zifa’s madness and arrogance turned them into lifeless robots, which froze inside the National Sports Stadium.
Norman Mapeza and his Class of 2011 will join a number of other groups of Warriors who failed to clear the final hurdle and, just like John Sibanda gifting Congo two goals that knocked us out of the ’92 Nations Cup finals and Kalusha Bwalya heading home a priceless equaliser to deny us a place at the ’94 showcase, the script looks distinctly familiar.

Lovemore Banda famously claimed that the only change were the characters – from Sibanda to Bruce Grobbelaar, from Francis Shonhayi to Method Mwanjali and from a tearful Agent Sawu to a heartbroken Knowledge Musona – but the Warriors’ storyline is built on the same tragic-comic script.
In Praia, the Warriors lost three points that could have taken them to their third Nations Cup finals but, in a Group A where no country won away from home throughout the campaign, the odds were firmly staked against Mapeza and his men winning that game.

It wasn’t in Praia, though, where this Warriors’ campaign was deflated.
Instead it was at the National Sports Stadium, on October 10 last year, where the virus that would eventually suck life out of the Warriors’ hearts, triggering a paralysis that would prevent them from clearing the final hurdle, was infected into the bloodstream of the Class of 2010/2011.

History has since recorded that the Warriors drew that game, 0-0 against Cape Verde, but that only tells a minor part of a man-made tragedy that unfolded in the week leading up to that game, with three different coaches taking charge of the team, a goalkeeper’s coach with a questionable past being planted into the system and a football-version of GNU being imposed on the technical team.
It all backfired in spectacular fashion.

During that week, we sowed the seeds of destruction that eventually crippled the Warriors and while Tom Saintfiet can watch from a distance in Ethiopia, waiting for the day his fat compensation cheque will come while relaxing in the company of thousands of people who see more value in long-distance running than football, the high cost of his brief flirtation with the Warriors continues to be felt across a country still struggling to come to terms with how this latest campaign failed.

A Warriors’ team that had started with an away point, deservedly won on the back of a game played with both spirit and style in Monrovia, suddenly found itself having to deal with the agents of contamination who, for some strange reasons, believed that the arrival of a foreigner, especially a white man, to take charge of their technical team, would be the catalyst to greatness.
While the benefits of bringing in foreign expertise can never be underplayed, the surprise choice of an inexperienced Belgian who had struggled in Namibia was not only a shocker but certainly put into perspective the limited ambitions of those who wanted to tear every page in the rule book to fast-track the engagement of this man as the national coach.

Such was the kamikaze approach that Saintfiet did not have a work permit by the time he started working with the Warriors on a Monday, ahead of that Cape Verde game, none had been applied for him either by his representatives or by Zifa, and – in that cocktail of madness – a lot of things went horribly wrong and swayed the focus from the preparations to the boardroom.
By the time we got into the weekend, with Cape Verde already here, the Warriors had been trained by Saintfiet, Luc Pfannestiel, Madinda Ndlovu and Mapeza, they had been three different head coaches –

Saintfiet, Madinda and Mapeza – a compromise CNU (Coaches of National Unity) was hatched by a divided Zifa board leading to Mapeza and Madinda assuming joint control of the technical team.
The players felt the impact of the madness and, on the eve of the decisive final qualifier in Praia, talismanic Warriors’ forward, Knowledge Musona, hammered home the message.
“The game we played against them (Cape Verde), in Harare, should not have been a draw,” he told The Herald in Praia.

“I think that is where we lost the big chance to qualify outright.”
Mapeza had bravely gone for youth, in the first game against Liberia, and was rewarded with a committed show by his troops.
He never got the chance to call the players who came in for the Cape Verde game, with that assignment being carried out by Saintfiet, who decided to change the approach that Mapeza had started with and recalled all the veterans who had been overlooked for the first match. Having taken one huge step forward, in the game against Liberia, the Warriors suddenly took five giant steps backwards ahead of the game against Cape Verde and that the match ended goalless, before a small crowd as fans stayed away from the chaos, spoke volumes about the way a golden opportunity had been wasted.

In the end Mali won Group A with 10 points, having won all their three home games and just one out of nine points away from their backyard.
If the Warriors had beaten Cape Verde, who lost 0-3 in Mali and 0-1 in Liberia, they would have got to the 10-point mark even after losing to the Atlantic Ocean islanders on Saturday.
The Warriors ended with eight and you only need to look at the two points they dropped at home against Cape Verde to find an answer why they didn’t end with the same tally as Mali on 10 points.

While a head-to-head analysis, in such a scenario, would have sent Mali through, it’s just half the story.
There is a very key area that needs exploration.
A victory over Cape Verde last October, which would certainly have been achieved without all that madness, would not only have given Zimbabwe a one-point Group lead, going into the final round of fixtures last weekend, but – crucially – would have eliminated the Atlantic Ocean islanders from the race before their last home game against the Warriors.

Cape Verde would have had six points, and out of the race, and it’s certain they would not have played with the same inspiration as they had on Saturday going into a home game knowing that a win could still carry them through should Mali also lose in Liberia. The Liberians called only four foreign-based players, because they had been eliminated from the race, for their final game against Mali and, after becoming the latest group to be accused by Zifa of match-fixing where they were accused of gifting the Eagles a win, they fought with spirit to earn a 2-2 draw.

If the Warriors had won against Cape Verde at home, they would have gone into their away match, against Mali, top of the table and – freed from the pressure and demons that came with just taking two points from their two matches – they would probably have played better and got a return than the 0-1 defeat they suffered in Bamako. It’s sad that this exciting Class of Warriors won’t be at the 2012 Nations Cup finals and it’s even more painful when every analysis shows they could certainly have made it had the Zifa board given them a chance to concentrate on that home tie against Cape Verde.

Yes, there were other factors that played a part in us not being in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea next year, but the home match against Cape Verde stands out.