Zimpapers Logo

Ellina Mhlanga Sports Reporter
THE Zimbabwe Handball Federation is expected to meet today at Girls High School in Harare to map the way forward concerning their participation in the upcoming Zone Six Championships in Zambia next month.

The championships will act as qualifiers for the All-Africa Games scheduled for September 4 to 19 in Brazzaville, Congo.

The edition marks the 50th anniversary of the Games as well as their return to Brazzaville, which hosted the first edition in 1965.

The tournament is scheduled to run from March 9 to 14 in Lusaka with men and women’s teams from countries in the Southern Africa region – Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and the hosts Zambia taking part.

Zimbabwe were invited to compete in the tournament early this month by the Confederation of African Handball and were hoping to send both the men and women national team.

The national association had to set up a resource mobilising team to raise funds for the teams headed by Patrick Mukombero and ZHF secretary-general, Alphios Magiya yesterday said they are meeting today to see if they will be able to travel to Zambia.

“We are having a meeting tomorrow (today), we are evaluating the strategies to see how far we have gone in mobilising the resources and make a decision on whether we are going or not.

“The players are currently training in their respective provinces and they are not yet in camp.

“We were looking for $24 650 for the two teams to meet accommodation, affiliation and travelling costs.

“I will be able to comment more on the trip after the meeting after getting the update from the team we set up to look for resources.

“We appointed the team a month ago and we met once so we decided to meet again tomorrow. The issue has been resources so we will only know after tomorrow’s meeting if we are going,” said Magiya.

The teams last competed in the All-Africa Games in 1995 when Zimbabwe hosted the event and Magiya said this has been due to the fact that participating teams were selected on the basis of rankings instead of qualifiers.

If the teams fail to travel to Zambia it will be an opportunity missed to qualify for the continental competition.

“It’s the only qualifier and if we don’t go we would have missed this edition. We last competed in 1995 and it has been a matter of the qualification system. They used continental rankings and if you fell out of that ranking you would not participate.