Who’s to blame now?

for all to see and the subsequent media hysteria, about how good our young players are, and even fundraising committees were to put in place for the tournament that begins on January 19 in South Africa.
Only the serious football pundits and coaches spoke with caution as the 90 minutes that were played last night were still to be played.
But there was no hiding in the heat of Luanda.
Angola sealed the match in just half a dozen minutes with a Manucho double served with chilling accuracy while at the same time exposing the defensive frailty that was all present even in the first leg.
Only a coach living in another world would depend with Esrom Nyandoro to command the troops from the centre of defence.
I still doubt the wisdom to go with Tinashe Nengomasha as the shield in front of the defence when all we know is that he is a one dimensional defensive linkman yet this match needed a player with more variation.
But we clearly needed this wake-up call for Zifa to realize that football is not all about Asiagate, or cutting corners for selfish ends, but it is more about choosing the right coach who in turn will have to call the right players for the team.
Corporates were whipped into coughing up thousands of dollars at the last minute but the reality is that football is played on the pitch and the players need to score goals to win.
And in Luanda, we scored none and were eliminated.
Coach Rahman Gumbo should take a lot of lessons from this defeat, that is, if he hasn’t passed the stage where he believes he can’t learn anything new in a career, as those who support him will always remind you, has seen him win league titles in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Botswana.
That none of those countries will be at the next Nations Cup finals can’t be a coincidence and that all three lost this weekend, with Botswana being humiliated by Mali in a 1-4 home defeat for a 1-7 aggregate loss, tells its own story.
Maybe Gumbo now knows that Khama Billiat is not very, very special and that his stellar show at Rufaro in September was in part aided by the confused Angola team who emerged for the first half.
Zimbabwe only scored twice with the third goal being an own goal.
In short Angola lost a match 3-1 in which they scored twice.
Khama can not be a playmaker in this side – now nobody doubts that.
On a day that things went according to plan for Angola, Zimbabwe were reduced to their level – that we have hardworking players who are not really excellent and who will do better if they are handled by a coach who is not as average as Rahman.
But there is also the other side, the Zifa board who have spent more time and resources on Asiagate and forgot their main call of ensuring Zimbabwe need to have strong national teams.
As it stands, this Zifa board has had two chances to take the Warriors to the Nations Cup finals and, on both occasion, they have failed.
Rafik Khan needed one chance and took it.
Now it needs no telling that even if all those better players, forced into a Asiagate trap are locked away for half a century, Zimbabwe will not be Afcon 2013 and will wait until after Brazil 2014 to start qualifiers for Libya 2015.
The defeat was necessary for all who thought Zifa, as some media outlets were beginning to say in hero-worshiping pieces, were very professional.
It is the same association that called the extra players into camp, not Gumbo, and we are likely to hear more of this story.
It is the same Zifa that decided to take 22v players in camp to Angola, not for football reasons, but for other reasons, and with this defeat, all eyes have been opened to where the problem is.
Now the nations wait to hear from Zifa their explanation for the loss when they usurped the powers of the coach and landed those powers in a technical committee.
Zimbabwe need to do everything right all the time.
When Angola Football Federation were pulling all stops to qualify, Zifa were busy extracting a few pages from the Ethics Committee on Asiagate to cause Gumbo more confusion ahead of their most crucial match.
Taking attention away from the plan of Gumbo, more questionable players were added to the side after being “cleared of wrongdoing.”
Even the class of 2004 and 2006, which assistant coach Peter Ndlovu fronted, were not the best in their group.
The Tunisia 2004 side qualified as best runners up after finishing second behind Mali in their group.
The Egypt 2006 Afcon side finished third behind Angola and Nigeria in the qualifiers that also served as World Cup 2006 qualifiers to make it for only the second time.
Zimbabwe national team has never done enough to finish top of their groups and it will take a lot of transformation in the boardroom for that to happen.
Now all who even at some point thought were going to join the other 15 best football nation on the continent, have realised that there is more to running football than picking petty fights and hiring and firing coaches at the drop of a hat.
It hurts that Zimbabwe have failed to qualify for the 2013 Nations Cup.
But that failure also brings its lessons and all we need to do is learn well and fast as time is lost.
But what can never escape the public scrutiny is that under this board not a single team has qualified for any tournament under their watch since taking over on March 27 2010.
It is a rude awakening.
At least now there won’t be Asiagate to blame, or third force or even players paid to lose matches as a way of fixing the board.
The entire Zifa, with the exception of its president Cuthbert Dube and women’s football boss Mavis Gumbo, were in attendance in Luanda when Manucho burst the bubble.
One hopes they picked some lessons, from that full house that pushed their team from the word go, especially against a background where our fans were kept away from Rufaro, when Angola came here, by a prohibitive US$10 price for the cheapest ticket.