dyton mupawaenda
Eddie Chikamhi-Senior Sports Reporter
NEW Warriors coach Michael Nees has vowed he will not bow to the influence of cartels in domestic football as he will base his team selection purely on merit.
The German expatriate coach was officially unveiled by ZIFA yesterday in Harare where he addressed a curious media on his plans to turn around the fortunes of Zimbabwean football.
Nees, who has previously coached Rwanda and Seychelles national football teams and held technical and elite coaching leadership positions in association football over the past 25 years across continents, revealed he needed space and autonomy when it comes to team selection.
The 57-year-old claimed he has never encountered serious problems with authorities seeking to interfere in team selections in his career and will not anticipate that with Zimbabwe, where allegations of shadowy cartels and unscrupulous player agents seeking to force their players in the national team have been made in recent years.
“In my previous jobs, which is not exactly how it appears on Wikipedia, I had to deal with a lot of representatives of players. It’s a fact that players have representatives or agents, but they don’t make selections.
“You have to select the best possible team for your upcoming challenges, and I have had no problems with them. I think we made it crystal clear to them always that there is a line which shouldn’t be crossed.
“A player must perform on the pitch, he must show us he is able, he must show the team he has commitment for the team… For me, the performance on the pitch is everything, nothing else, and I have no family relations or kinship relations here, so you can be assured that I can be objective,” said Nees.
His immediate task is to announce the squad for the upcoming Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers against Kenya and Cameroon coming up in a fortnight.
Both matches will be held at the Mandela National Stadium in Kampala, Uganda.
“We need to embark in a good start. We can have quantitative objectives to say we must have a win or a qualitative objective which is how you play, with what energy, with what discipline, and with what style.
“If you come out of a game and you can say we did everything in our powers to give a good performance then the quantitative objective or the result will follow.
“We must not separate that. We must play decent football with confidence, with discipline, with passion in order to have the results. First is to apply that and then the other things will follow,” said Nees.
Online Reporter