AFRICA’S BIG BOYS LINE UP DATE WITH WARRIORS

CHIYANGWARobson Sharuko Senior Sports Editor
ZIFA president Philip Chiyangwa says the Warriors have become hot property on the continent, with a number of Africa’s traditional football giants lining up to take them in friendly internationals before the 2017 Nations Cup finals in Gabon in January.

The Warriors ended a 10-year wait for a place at the Nations Cup finals when they booked their place in Gabon with a match to spare in the qualifiers, winning their group with a three-point cushion and coach Callisto Pasuwa even affording the luxury of leaving out star forward Khama Billiat from the final assignment against Guinea in Conakry.

They lost that game 0-1, the only defeat they suffered in their six group matches, with coach Pasuwa resting Billiat — who has transformed himself into one of the best, if not the best, footballer plying his trade in Africa today, because the forward has been playing competitive football, non-stop, since August last year.

Billiat has already inspired his club Mamelodi Sundowns of South Africa into the final of the CAF Champions League for the first time in 15 years, scoring three goals along the way and providing a number of crucial assists and only Basem Morsy of Zamalek, with four goals, has scored more among the players still part of the tournament.

The Warriors’ stunning turnaround, from the dumps of being knocked out in the first round of the preliminary phase of the 2015 Nations Cup qualifiers to pushing West African giants Guinea into the shade as they comprehensively dominated their group, has not gone unnoticed in African football.

And Chiyangwa, who is in Cairo, Egypt, for the CAF Congress, told The Herald yesterday that the Warriors’ revival has attracted the interest of a number of African football heavyweights who want to play them in friendly internationals in the countdown to the 2017 Nations Cup finals in Gabon.

The Warriors are the only southern African senior national football team who will be in Gabon after the region’s traditional giants, Zambia and South Africa, were swept away by the challenges of trying to book their place at the 2017 Nations Cup finals.

The Harare property tycoon says he arrived in Cairo on a mission to try and find strong opponents for the Warriors to help the team thoroughly prepare for Gabon and was charmed to find that there were a number of giants who wanted to play them in friendly internationals having been impressed by the team’s spectacular improvement.

“I have been talking to a couple of my colleagues here, the football leaders of various countries, and they have all been telling me they are impressed, in a very big way, with the way we have risen from the ashes to become one of the nations that will be playing at the 2017 AFCON finals in Gabon.”

“For us to be the only southern African country to qualify for the 2017 AFCON finals, is something special and we are proud that we won’t be just representing ourselves in Gabon, but our entire region and we owe everyone, who is from southern Africa, to compete very well in Gabon.

“If we do very well in Gabon we would have done well for our region and that is why we need to prepare well for the tournament so that our boys will be firing from all cylinders at that AFCON because I am not the one who is just satisfied with just making up the numbers.

“I am not one person who will tell you that simply because we have qualified we should just sit and celebrate. I’m a person who says we should now do even more and that means doing better than what we did in the last two occasions we played in the finals.

“We are geared to make an impression in Gabon and I can tell you that there are very few teams in Africa who will say they are comfortable playing us when that tournament gets underway because they have been telling me here that we have a strong team that can stand its own against any side in Gabon.

“But they know where we are coming from, I mean, the struggles that we faced in the past when we would be eliminated at the first round of the qualifying stages and they don’t want us to go back there, they want to help us keep the momentum because we have been writing a beautiful football story that the continent is proud of and that is why they say they are ready to play us in friendlies.”

Chiyangwa said giants Cote d’Ivoire, who are the defending African champions, Nigeria and Senegal are some of the West African nations who could be playing the Warriors in international friendlies before the 2017 AFCON finals in Gabon.

“We could be playing Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Senegal, these are giants in the game, and we could be playing Guinea Bissau, Libya, Uganda, Madagascar and our neighbours Zambia and South Africa who want tough preparatory matches for their World Cup campaign and after I have sorted out all the issues we will be announcing the opposition and when we will be playing them,” said Chiyangwa.

“This is an exciting period for Zimbabwe football and we should grab the initiative because we have a chance to make our nation proud and also make our supporters very happy.

“As the leadership we are driven by the desire to make our team successful and also to ensure that our football thrives in all this and we believe we are on the right track.”

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