Which way now Mr president?

ZIMBABWEANS are very good people, but they can be very mean, especially if you mess around with their national treasures. One such treasure is the flagship football team, the Warriors, who have now been christened Worriers, for the heartbreak they inflicted on the nation when losing in the very first hurdle of the 2015 African Cup of Nations qualifiers.

It is therefore not surprising that Zifa president Cuthbert Dube, his chief executive Jonathan Mashingaidze and board are on the firing line once more, and it is not surprising that coach Ian Gorowa, his assistants and players are having their qualities questioned once more. If that had not happened this week, then there would be something wrong with our media and Zimbabweans in general.

What made the defeat much bitter was that we are traditionally a better footballing nation than Tanzania, who knocked us out 3-2 on aggregate. Even after the weekend results, we are still better ranked, 26 in Africa while the Taifa Stars are on 32, and 99 in the world while the Tanzanians are on 113, according to the Fifa World rankings.

What we can only deduce from this encounter is that after beating us 1-0 in the first leg away, the Tanzanians did not sit on their laurels because they knew the potential that the Warriors have. They started travelling early and engaged Malawi in a friendly a few days before the Sunday showdown, and they were rewarded with a 2-2 draw. And what did we do?

After suffering a setback in Tanzania, we all thought oh well, we can still hammer them at home and we folded our hands and waited for that shiny Sunday afternoon, and so did Zifa. Warriors coach Gorowa requested for the postponement of league games a week prior to the match so that he can have a long period in training with the boys but he was not supported by either Zifa or PSL and his sentiments just remained media sound bites.

Even during the week of the national team training, there were little efforts by Zifa officials to motivate the team ahead of the crunch tie, instead, what we were hearing were bickering on who should head this and that sub committee and who should be co-opted into those committees. Instead of planning on how to make the Warriors comfortable and deliver come Sunday, Zifa board members, including their chief executive, were busy preparing for a board meeting whose outcome had no bearing on the results on the pitch. Perhaps the only bearing of the results of some issues from the board meeting would be bragging rights in pubs (LOL), if you are living in this world of information technology, you would know this means laugh out loud.

But the truth of the matter is that football fans do not care who is in charge of which committee at Zifa, they do not even care who is in which committee, all they want are results on the field of play and that is the crucial point that seems to have eluded Zifa officials. And even to the media, such issues make news to fill up space because they do not sell the papers. Football fans might want to know who is running the game on the grand stage, and their interest ends there, the rest is for housekeeping and politicking in Zifa corridors, period.

While the Warriors did not have their best days on the field, they were not alone in misfiring with their board caught offside in as far as preparations were concerned. Once again, the issue of money came into the picture with players refusing to train at some point during the week and it had to take the intervention of president Dube and his vice Omega Sibanda who addressed the players for them to continue with their preparations. What ever amount the players were promised and they felt it was not enough, you tend to feel sorry for them because half the time they have been promised lies. And after sweating for a cool prize of $250,000 from the Chan tournament, where ordinarily they were entitled to sharing half of that among themselves, they were told they would get about $35,000, yet no one has bothered to tell the nation what has happened to the rest of the money since the association is still saddled by debt and did not even have money to pay accommodation bills for visiting Tanzania, who were briefly locked out from training until Dube had to chip in from his own pocket.

Suppose the Zifa CEO had told the nation that the rest of the money would be used for future assignments, it would have been better music to the nation and players in particular, but even now, you can not get a straight answer as to what happened to the money and it is such issues of corporate governance that put off people and sponsors alike, and when the team losses, temperatures just boil with those issues being raised again and some in Zifa might feel targeted, but that would be a result of a build up of a number of issues that certainly do not add up.

We have heard so much about apologies. Now what we want is a programme of action from the national association. They should tell the nation how they would plan programmes for the Under-17, Under-20 and Under-23, women’s teams and the locally based players who will play in the Cosafa tournament so as to salvage our pride.

The fact that we will be on the sidelines of international football for about two years gives them enough time to regroup and come up with proper structures to identify players who will stick together and be a hard nut to crack come the start of the 2017 Afcon qualifiers. The programme has to start now, it is a programme that would be more appealing to the masses than who heads this and that sub committee.

That programme of action would be better to help massage the ego of president Dube, whose promises in the manifesto have gone up in smoke in less than four months. He promised to take us to the next Afcon finals, and already we are out of it, before even other serious footballing African nations start to play group qualifiers. Need we talk of the 2018 World Cup? No, I don’t think so. Which way now Mr president?

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