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Bigboy Mawiwi

Petros Kausiyo Deputy Sports Editor
REIGNING Coach of the Year and Harare City mentor Bigboy Mawiwi has been fired by the Sunshine Boys, becoming the third Premiership coach to lose his job as the championship race entered its second and decisive stage at the weekend. Mawiwi, who was saved by former chairman Leslie Gwindi from being fired after just six games, was eventually shown the door yesterday following a string of poor results.

Harare City’s executive have now handed the reins to assistant coach Masimba Dinyero on a caretaker basis.
Despite Mawiwi professing ignorance about the development, Harare City secretary Mathew Marara confirmed that they had wielded the axe on their head coach.

Marara said the confirmation by the Zifa assembly last week that four teams would be relegated from the Premiership at the end of this season had also prompted the Harare City management “to act fast in order to avoid relegation’’.

“The rest of the technical team remains unchanged. It is only the head coach Bigboy Mawiwi whom we have fired. So Masimba Dinyero will be the caretaker coach and we will continue to review our situation as we go on.

“Now that four teams are going to be relegated we are not going to take chances and we think with the way things were going with Mawiwi we were going to be relegated and so we had to act fast.

“We have a very good pool of players at Harare City and we think the coach is to blame for not selecting the best players for the job. We had also set targets but Bigboy is one guy who does not believe in targets and that is one of the areas where we differed,’’ Marara said.
Marara also alleged that Mawiwi had strayed off from his technical duties and had been meddling in administrative matters.

“The coach should concentrate more on technical issues and go into administrative matters because we have people in administration who are mandated to do that.

“As management we measure a coach’s success on technical matters and results on the pitch and not on his contribution to administration issues,’’ Marara said.

Mawiwi, who for the last two days had been attending a high-profile coaching clinic conducted for Premiership coaches by the visiting Barcelona Football School pair of Isaac Oriol Guerrero Hernandez and Daniel Bigas Alsina, said he was not aware of the Harare City management’s decision.
“I am still in the dark, I have been attending the Barcelona coaching clinic and I have not talked to anyone from the club about my position.

“So all I can talk about at the moment is this very vital course which we have been attending which has been an eye-opener and very educative.
“We have learnt a lot, especially on how to develop juniors, and we have come to learn that even tiki-taka is not an event, it is a process and as coaches we need to be careful and to be patient with the young players,’’ Mawiwi said.

But after coming close to winning the championship title in only their second year in the top-flight, Harare City have had an indifferent season and Mawiwi has virtually been trading on slippery ground.

After 16 rounds of matches last year, Harare City had accumulated 31 points and were at the top of the table, forcing the rest of the Premiership to stop and take a look at their exploits and Mawiwi had set the platform to stake a claim for the Coach of the Year award which he eventually won after his side finished third only because of an inferior goal difference.

Eventual champions Dynamos, runners-up Highlanders and Harare City all ended with 54 points in a title race that was decided on the final day of the season as Dynamos beat Black Mambas 2-0, Bosso thrashed Shabanie Mine 3-1 while the Sunshine Boys were restricted to a 2-2 draw by CAPS United.

But just how times change?
At the same stage now, the Sunshine Boys are 14th with just 15 points from four wins and three draws and with four teams going at the end of the season Harare City, who are five points ahead of bottom-placed Chiredzi and have the same number of points with 15th placed Bantu Rovers, are indeed swimming in the dangerous relegation zone. This is also despite the fact that Harare City bolstered their squad with massive acquisitions at the start of the 2014 season.

Mawiwi, who lost talisman Silas Songani to the Danish league, brought in nine new faces including Warriors trialist forward Misheck Mburayi who arrived from Triangle but has been a major flop.