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FINALLY, we have a substantive coach for the Warriors after ZIFA settled on German gaffer Michael Nees.
It ends a lengthy year-long wait in which the association’s leaders have been trying, and failing, to come up with a coach for the senior national team.
Nees, 57, was not the favourite to win the job among the five coaches who had been shortlisted by ZIFA.
The favourite was Wilfried Schafer, 74, who is his countryman and on his CV shows that he won the AFCON with Cameroon in 2002.
However, there was concern that Schafer’s best years were well and truly behind him and we believe that the ZIFA leaders were right to overlook him for this job.
In his first interview with the association, Nees said he was confident he can take the Warriors back to the AFCON finals and even the World Cup.
He conceded that there was a lot of football talent in this country and all that was needed was to give that talent the right tactical and technical guidance to make them compete with the best on the continent.
He said the Warriors were largely predictable and they needed something to give them the X-Factor, which they have been missing, which can help them to compete with the best.
The problem with those statements is that we have heard them before from other coaches who came to this country to lead our national football team.
Most of those coaches failed in their mission and we hope that Nees will not add his name to that list of failures.
Our concern is that Nees’ CV looks lightweight and his previous stints with African national teams came with coaching Rwanda and Seychelles.
His first game as coach of a national team came against us in February 2003 during the 2004 Nations Cup qualifiers and his Seychelles team was beaten 1-3 at the National Sports Stadium with the Ndlovu brothers — Peter and Adam — scoring the goals.
Nees is largely believed to be a specialist in coaching the coaches, someone like the late Nelson Matongorere.
That’s where he has largely flourished, in the classroom, rather than on the field of play.
There is a huge difference between doing very well in the classroom, coaching the coaches, and doing very well in the trenches of coaching footballers.
There is no failure in the classroom while in on the field of play a coach is judged by his results and there is no place to hide.
This is where our concern lies when it comes to Nees.
He will coach a team which has been to the AFCON finals five times, including three times on the trot in recent times, yet he doesn’t know what it means to coach at the Nations Cup finals.
We have gambled that his first success story, in taking a team to the AFCON finals, will come with us.
It’s a huge gamble we have taken and the other problem is that foreign coaches have, historically, not done well here.
Online Reporter