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Phillip Zulu
Special Correspondent
THE euphoria of Zimbabwe playing against Senegal at the on-going African Cup of Nations tournament in Cameroon is over.
Sadly, the result was the same trend that has seen our nation lose in very unclear circumstances.
We lost it right at the end of the four extra minutes awarded by the Guatemalan referee Mario Escobar in stoppage time. A well-taken penalty by Sadio Mane gave Warriors goalkeeper Petros Mhari no chance to give the tournament’s favourites a 1-0 victory on Monday afternoon.
This defeat forms a string of poor results that have slowly been damaging our world rankings as we have lost 13 games in competitive football and won just one in the last two years.
This result, though harsh, the manner in which Kelvin Madzongwe reacted to block a shot towards goal from the edge of the box left a lot to be desired. As a genuine attempt to “defend’’ his goal, he cynically dived with both hands stretched to block a shot as a host of his teammates were packed in front of goal, including the alert goalkeeper, Mhari.
Everything looked comical at that decisive moment as Madzongwe went down on his knees in reaction to the referee’s decision; he sunk his knees on the ground as if praying for the earth to “swallow’’ him because he probably knew what he did was unacceptable.
That shot was nowhere near the goal-line and it wasn’t that threatening.
As usual, the game started off well in typical fashion where we looked capable of causing upsets against these big teams from West Africa. But a closer scrutiny of how we tried to build up play from the back was a bit problematic in that we lacked the urgency of intent to increase the tempo of passing, movement and attacking with width in wide areas so as to allow one-on-one situations with wing backs and also allow early crosses into the box or encourage clever interchange of quick play to break the defensive units with bursts of speed into small spaces in the back line of defensive unit.
We didn’t threaten nor show cause why we seek to be perennial qualifiers of this prestigious tournament. We had far too many slow moving players who were content in packing the defence, yet Senegal was looking dishevelled and frightened by our decent ability on the ball whenever we got it.
For a team that had some of their best players sidelined by Covid-19, Senegal’s performance was shockingly poor and the only thing that made them celebrate was Mane’s last-gasp goal.
Here we are again, the trend is the same for every game played in the last three AFCON tournaments under the staff of the very same agent. The results are almost the same and in typical fashion of collapsing in the very same dying minutes of the game.
We witnessed for once, how Kundai Benyu could have been a key figure in this squad if equal opportunities and fair selection of players had been an embodiment of our professionalism in managing all national teams.
But, we watched Benyu as a half-fit player who has a similar style of play too familiar with Denver Mukamba and a not-so-perfect version of Ronald “Gidiza’’ Sibanda.
The dangers of trying to attack from central areas of the pitch clearly exposed our limitations in the exquisiteness of the technical intelligence and creativity in unlocking such a defence that was so shaky. Our two wing-backs lacked confidence and high levels of attacking play when they started moves from the back, everything was not convincing in that, once in possession after the centre line, our runs down the channels became excessive and imperious.
A simple build up quickly turned into a low gear drive against a team that lacked quality in all areas of the game. We are to blame when this game was crying out for youth dynamism in critical areas of the game where we needed much presence in forcing their backline to back pedal under intense pressure.
Bill Antonio (Dynamos), Michael Ndiweni (Newcastle United) or Gerald Sibanda (Gillingham), could have given us that “athletic impudent’’ against Senegal.
We overly respected them for no reasons as we opted to send high balls to their tall centre-backs who took that gesture as manna from heaven.
Online Reporter