Will Mhlauri return?

Mhlauri has been holding private discussions with the Zifa board and the two parties appeared to have struck a deal when an agreement was reached for the coach to be paid a US$10 000 salary to woo him from America back into the jungles of African football.
The negotiations had even gone to such an advanced stage that Mhlauri laid down his conditions, in terms of his backroom staff, and told Zifa that he would only work in an environment where he was given the freedom to choose his assistants.
But it appears the odds are shifting and the good money now might be on Mhlauri not return-ing home for another dance with the Warriors unless there are dramatic changes in the next few weeks.
Mhlauri is employed by the Lightning Soccer Club, based in the Upper Valley area of New Hampshire area in the United States, as the director of coaching.
The club specialises in offering football pla-yers, aged between 8 to 18, “the chance to learn, train and compete with similar-skilled peers under the guidance of highly-qualified coaches.”
A community-based, non-profit making organisation, Lightning Soccer Club specialises in personalised attention for the development of junior football players and skill development.
Kris Graham, the Lightning Soccer Club Managing Director, yesterday could not shed any light on the speculation related to Mhlauri’s possible return to coach the Warriors ahead of their resumption of their 2012 Nations Cup qualifiers against Mali in Bamako next month.
Asked to comment on the issue, Graham instead said he had directed all questions to Mhlauri who could not be contacted last night.
But a raft of projects that are on the Lightning Soccer Club menu, including indoor winter training programmes and spring training programmes set to go on until May, with Mhlauri earmarked to play a big part in all of them, suggests that the coach might be staying in the United States.
Mhlauri has been taking charge of the club’s indoor winter training programme involving the Under-15, Under-16 and Under-18 boys’ football teams.
He is also set to take charge of the Under-8 spring development programme, whose registration is currently open for kids interested in taking part, which is scheduled to run until the end of May.
“Charles Mhlauri is the Director of Coaching of Lightning Soccer Club. He is the former head coach of the Zimbabwe national team, participating in the World Cup and Africa Cup of Nations Games,” the Lightning Soccer Club boasts on its website.
“Charles holds the German A licence, the most advanced coaching degree in Germany, in addition to the International DFB Coaching Certificate.
“He has worked with some of the top German clubs, including Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen, training both senior and junior players.
“In addition to his work on the national team and in youth programmes, Charles has coached and produced some of the top players in the English Premier League, such as Benjani Mwaruwari (Manchester City), and Peter Ndlovu (Coventry FC, Sheffield FC, Birmingham City FC).”
Mhlauri, as director of coaching, has a number of coaches who work under him and they include five female coaches, including Cindy Bennett, a former Goalkeeper of the Year in the American Eastern Conference, Chantelle Blair, an All-Star member of her Inter-Collegiate Conference, and Shannon Boisvert.
There are also about 16 other male football coaches who work under Mhlauri at the Lightning Soccer Club and they include Rick Bourdon, “who has over 25 years of experience coaching youth soccer and holds a USSF National “C” License,” John Brigham, Matt Burch and Wayne Burwell.
What might also be working against Mhlauri’s possible return home is his involvement in a number of other projects, related to football, in the United States, outside his job at Lightning Soccer Club.
Mhlauri also holds training camps at Bowdoin College, Wesleyan University, Yale University, Dartmouth College and Franklin Pierce University and also runs the New England Junior Prep Soccer Camp in partnership with fellow Lightning coach Mike Doherty.
He is also involved, as ambassador, in Grass Roots Soccer, an international non-profit organisation that provides African youth with knowledge, life skills, and support to live HIV-free through the game of football.
Doherty is the former men’s head coach at Colgate University.
“During his 20 years as head coach, Mike was named the Lanzera National Coach of the Year, the Patriot League Coach of the Year, and earned two NSCAA Regional Coach of the Year honors,” the Lightning Soccer Club says on its website.
“He also captured two Howard Hartman Awards as Colgate’s coach of the year.
“Mike coached an All-American, nine first-team all-region players, 28 first-team all-Patriot League selections, and one Patriot League Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year, two Rookies of the Year, and two tournament MVPs.
“As the former Managing Director of the Lightning Soccer Club, Mike helped build the club to compete at the state and regional levels in numbers not seen before by the club, sending two teams to the Region 1 Championships.
‘Mike serves as the Associate Director of Admissions at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, NH and is the head girls varsity coach at KUA.”
Given such a strong foundation, which he has created in what clearly appears to be a thriving project, Mhlauri appears to have found himself having to decide whether to dump these youth development programmes, which are certainly stress-free, for the furnace of the Warriors’ technical department.
Although the money being offered by Zifa looks good and Mhlauri knows that he needs to come back to the big time of coaching competitive teams if he is to keep growing as a coach, the risks of taking the job – after three years spent in the tranquility of coaching youthful players – might be proving too much for him to make the gamble.
Those who claim to have been in contact with Mhlauri, since news first broke through that he was now Zifa’s first choice for the Warriors’ job, have been saying that the excitement they used to detect in him, about a possible return home, now appears to have disappeared.
“I think the time factor is what should now tell us that this deal might not happen after all because the game against Mali is not that far away,” said the sources.
“Charlie also had this tricky relationship with the local media when he left and certainly the emergence of stories about his family in the local newspapers and on the websites appears to be sending a message that the knives are being sharpened again. But you never know because in football things can change quickly and, until he says something officially, this story will keep twisting and turning.”