adminFRIDAY FOOTBALL ECHOES: Gamechanger
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The meltdown at the just-ended Africa Cup of Nations in Gabon by Zimbabwe’s senior men’s team has left many groping for answers and while blame continues to be shifted around, one creature – the High Performance Committee – has also come under fire.
The HPC was put in place basically to supervise the national teams and comprises Zifa vice-president, Omega Sibanda as the chairperson, Sunday “Mhofu” Chidzambwa (vice-chair), the association’s technical director Taurai Mangwiro, Rahman Gumbo, Moses “Bambo” Chunga, Innocent Chogugudza and ex-Fifa panel assistant referee, Masimba Chihowa.
It would appear this overseeing commission always had some deep-seated misgivings about Warriors coach, Kallisto Pasuwa, given how fragile the gaffer’s relationship with the committee’s chair was and what other plight, most of which was somewhat avoidable, bedeviled the Warriors camp during the former Dynamos coach’s reign.
The long and short of it all is that the HPC had particularly been viewed with suspicion by skeptics.
This all coming against the backdrop that ex-Fifa development officer for Southern Africa and veteran administrator, Ashford Mamelodi, once warned of the dangers of such a scheme.
“The national coach in any part of the world reports to the executive through the chief executive. You are not going to have a national coach reporting to a committee or a group of coaches. That won’t work at all and it has never worked . . . and believe you me, many countries especially in Africa have tried without success to have such a setup.
“A national coach is an independent soul and the minute you try to help him with his job or if you appear to be interfering with his job and trying to influence how things should be done, you are going to have serious problems.
“So if the HPC in Zimbabwe is going to superintend over the national coach you should brace for problems and even instability in the Nations Cup squad.
“It’s either you trust the coach or you don’t. And if you don’t trust the coach then you look for another one, but even that replacement coach is going to reject any moves he may feel to be interfering with his duties . . . that is their nature,” Mamelodi was quoted as telling our sister publication The Herald last September.
And true to that, previous Warriors coaches, Norman “Nomara” Mapeza, Ian “Dibango” Gorowa and Chidzambwa once reportedly resisted the arrangement of working under a technical director or having a committee superintend them!
While the spotlight has thus far been on Pasuwa and his charges following their tame and fruitless effort to conquer the African football jungle in Gabon, the lenses have also zoomed in on the HPC and their role in the development of our national game.
The committee has recommended that Zifa should not renew Pasuwa’s contract.
But it may look like this HPC might have been working into the Warriors’ mentor’s own work all this while.
This committee is just a high-sounding nothing, by my book, and if we are not careful we may create many other undesirable challenges that will continue to destabilise the senior men’s team.
With the exception of Chidzambwa, no other coach who sits on that committee has done anything spectacularly special that the record-breaking championship-winning coach with Dynamos hasn’t.
Maybe this is just the nature of the job that the coach is always in the line of firing and usually becomes the first casualty, but Bambo is currently out of a job after being shown the exit by Harare City following less than a single season in charge; Gumbo was unable to lead Chicken Inn to mounting a serious defence of their Castle Lager Premier Soccer League title; Mangwiro has found the going tough at both CAPS United and Harare City; while Chogugudza is a virtual nonentity who remains a peripheral figure on the coaching landscape in Zimbabwe.
And yet these are Pasuwa’s so-called supervisors!
Maybe many did not see this coming, but the moment the HPC raised some dust – even as Pasuwa was dancing in the water – about the calibre of his assistants, it was only a matter of delaying the inevitable that the whole technical team would eventually be doubted and dissolved. For questioning the value of the assistants the coach had himself picked, was this, by extension, not a thinly veiled expression of doubt, also, in Pasuwa’s own abilities?
Now here we are.
At one point this HPC was accused of trying to frustrate Pasuwa out.
Remember, Dear Reader, Sibanda has previously on one occasion fired the Warriors tactician under unclear circumstances; only for him to be reinstated in his role following a public outcry and the intervention of Zifa president Philip Chiyangwa who, then, claimed to be away on leave. At another point Warriors team manager Sharif Mussa also became an easy target by the HPC for alleged misconduct and insubordination.
Also, the beleaguered Zifa boss once went on record as saying Pasuwa would never leave his Warriors job for as long as his tenure subsisted at the helm of the association, and while that might have been cheap politicking where does that leave Chiyangwa now? How does he now handle this scenario that has just cropped up: that the HPC wants Pasuwa out and yet Captain Fiasco himself had declared that the coach would remain assimilated into the Warriors structures?
Typical football hot potato this is.
Maybe Chiyangwa is trying to buy time when he tells a restive football family that Zimbabwe has become in the aftermath of Gabon that he shall announce the “way forward” in due course, but that time is definitely coming when he will have to face and tackle the elephant in the room.
As well as running the risk of creating a parallel structure of a Warriors technical team, as feared by some pundits and fans, what if the committee itself comes to a point whereby they fail to agree among themselves on issues raised and discussed and, therefore, become divided on some matters? What if whoever is going to come in as the new Warriors coach finds their suggestions and recommendations not palatable with their own philosophy?
Is that not going to create problems for the parties involved?
At worst, this HPC animal – which was an ill-conceived idea in the first place – is only a distraction and in its endeavour to stay relevant it wants to be seen to be doing something. It is only in busyness and not the business of adding any real value to the Warriors setup.
The present system of our football is clearly malfunctioning and even if we bring in another coach without addressing the fundamental flaws blighting our game, then the wise men around shall surely invoke one of Albert Einstein’s famous quotes on us: that of insanity or stupidity where we would be doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
We must end this vicious cycle.
We need to create a virtuous circle.
It’s Game On, Play On!
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Online Reporter