LVG WAS AN INSULT TO COACHING, HOPEFULLY HIS COUNTRYMAN AKBAY IS BETTER

SHARUKO MIDDLE  28 MAYYY NEWLIKE a dinosaur he remained trapped in the past, left behind by a train that had long gone, a coach who pointed to one night in Vienna in 1995 for his finest hour when Patrick Kluivert’s late goal powered Ajax Amsterdam to victory in the UEFA Champions League final.

He remained loyal to a primitive philosophy that time had long forgotten, a fatal attraction to possession that meant nothing, telling his players that keeping the ball in areas of the field — where the opponent never felt threatened — was more important than an adventure into the opposition penalty area.

His huge book was his bible, and in it he scribbled notes that were of no significance and plucked out moves from hell that had long lost their potency in modern-day football, overtaken by two decades of revolution in the coaching manuals that had occurred since his big night in Vienna.

A stubborn Dutchman who somehow believed he was God’s gift to coaching, for whom remaining slumped in his seat on Match Day was a virtue he would strangely, in this era of technology, even have directed operations by WhatsApp Messenger from home without caring to come to the stadium.

The rigidity of the model of his football was frustrating, clipping the wings of a team that had built its reputation — and a lot of its success stories — on freestyle attacking football, transforming them from Red Devils into Defensive Devils, and spending a fortune on a number of players who couldn’t fit, let alone understand, his chaotic formula.

On the day the football gods somehow helped him to his finest hour, that night in Vienna 21 years ago, AC Milan were the victims and, as fate would have it, the Italian giants’ San Siro home ground will tonight host the 2016 UEFA Champions League final as the world says goodbye to a week when the football club I support finally called time on their disastrous flirtation with this dinosaur.

Aloysius Paulus Maria Van Gaal, simply known as LVG, was finally sacked this week for spending a vast fortune to turn Manchester United into the most boring, lifeless, toothless, predictable, one-dimensional, flat, colourless, insipid, prosaic, spiritless, stale and unimaginative side world football has ever seen since the Crazy Gang of Wimbledon.

I was never his fan, always arguing that if he was an excellent coach, not one whose reputation was built on a fluke result one night in Vienna, he would have won more European Cup titles than the single medal in his cabinet given that he had coached, along the way, super clubs like Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

The wild events at Old Trafford in the last two years, when Manchester United were reduced to a club that would now fight for crumbs like the FA Cup, consider finishing fourth in the league a success story and routinely miss the group stages of the UEFA Champions League, should remind us — if we ever doubted — of the value of a coach in a football team.

In an era dominated by superstar players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the coach has been pushed into the shadows but, as Callisto Pasuwa has shown at Dynamos and the Warriors, a very good coach remains a very vital ingredient for success in football.

Pasuwa might have graduated to take charge of the senior national team, where he now stands on the threshold of ending the country’s lengthy wait for a return to the Nations Cup finals — after his record-breaking stint at Dynamos where he won four straight league titles — but there are technical riches on the benches of the domestic Premiership.

It’s a measure of the progress the local coaches are making that even the rich clubs in South Africa are now looking across the Limpopo for technical guidance with Joey Antipas and his lieutenant Prince Matore having been handed the assignment to revive the fortunes of AmaZulu, who are struggling in the backwaters of Division One football in that country.

Our coaches have, for some time now, dominated the landscape in the Botswana top-flight league but, given the lack of quality in that league, their achievements there have largely been ignored here because the football played there is considered to be largely poor it’s more of recreation than the cut-throat battles of competitive sport.

Rahman Gumbo is back home, after years in the wilderness of the Botswana top-flight league and the backwaters of the Malawi Premiership, where he, predictably, won a number of league titles because his technical superiority was from another time, another era, which the leagues in those countries are yet to reach.

The man we call Rush returns home to find the domestic Premiership pregnant with an array of very good coaches — from the impressive young ones like Lizwe Sweswe of Tsholotsho, who in my little book was the Coach of the Year last season for helping a team, which played all their matches away from home, somehow survive relegation — to the veteran ones like Sunday Chidzambwa and David Mandigora.

Norman Mapeza has just gone 29 league games without defeat in a record-breaking run for a coach who is rated very highly by my colleague Grace Chirumanzu, one of the local female journalists to take a plunge, and swim in this profession when it was largely infested by the male specimens.

Kelvin Kaindu, the likeable Zambian coach who has made this country his adopted home, has the makings of becoming a genius on the bench, Lloyd Chitembwe is doing wonders now he is back at the green, green grass of home at CAPS United, Philani “Beefy” Ncube stubbornly refuses to be buried by the challenges of this game, Kifton “Somalia” Kadurira is making his bow on the big stage and Taku Shariwa is one for the future.

BOSSO HAVING A DANCE WITH ANOTHER DUTCHMAN

The Battle of Zimbabwe today between Dynamos and Highlanders at Rufaro brings Bosso’s Dutch coach, Erol Akbay, face-to-face with the reality, and intensity, of a no-holds-barred contest pregnant with emotion on the stands that usually produces fireworks on the field between rivals who throw everything at their opponents in this super-charged duel.

Akbay has been in charge of the country’s oldest football club, a proud institution with a loyal support base that believes Bosso is more than just a football team, but a part of their DNA, a reason to live for, in seven league games, but the scenes that will confront him at Rufaro today are something that he has never seen before.

The outpouring of emotion from the stands, as the fans stand side-by-side with their men on the pitch, the songs of battle that will be booming from the terraces, the sledging between the two sets of rival fans, the eruption of joy when there is a goal, the rebellion when a questionable call by the referee goes against them and the beauty of the colours that define their identity.

He has seen his men win four of their seven league games, including an impressive four-goal demolition of newboys Ngezi Platinum, but he will quickly know that a goal, just one goal, for his boys in today’s encounter, carries its weight in gold and is more treasured, in the stands, than all the four goals that his team scored in Ngezi.

It’s a contest that has been spiced by expectations within the Highlanders family that, just like CAPS United before them just a few weeks ago at the same venue, the time is now ripe to end all those years of the pain inflicted by these Glamour Boys, this raging bully that has made life miserable for them for the better part of the decade, with Dynamos simply refusing to be beaten by Bosso when it comes to league contests.

Some Bosso fans argue that this punishment should have ended three years ago at the same venue when Highlanders led until six minutes into time added on when Partson Jaure popped up on the back post and stabbed the ball home for an equaliser that torched controversy on both the mainstream and social media sites for months.

But that’s a debate for another day, today what matters is another confrontation between the country’s two biggest football clubs and, if Akbay, relatively unknown when he arrived at Highlanders, can guide his men to a landmark victory to end the pain that has been inflicted all these years by these Glamour Boys, then he would have passed a big test.

There are many in this country who still question the value that these unheralded foreign coaches bring to the domestic Premiership and Paulo Jorge Silva’s short stay at Dynamos, long on drama and short on points where he won just one league game before the club’s leaders called time on their experiment with him, provides this group of people with a lot of ammunition.

There are others who still believe that these expatriates should be given support because they bring a new dimension to our game and that Silva remains very, very popular among a section of the DeMbare fans, who feel that his revolution was sabotaged and he could have made a big difference had he been given more time, is testimony to that.

The Bosso fans will be hoping that Akbay is not a clone of his Dutch compatriot LVG and if he can deliver the blow that finally knocks down their bitter rivals Dynamos, in a league match, he would be worth the decision by their club’s leadership to invest into an expatriate gaffer.

If he falls short and, like those before him in the past 10 years, he fails to beat DeMbare in the battle that matters, questions will inevitably be asked whether he is the right man for the job because this game, more than any other in the domestic Premiership, has the potential of destroying everything good that he has done so far.

The last Bosso coach to beat DeMbare in a league match was Methembe Ndlovu, exactly 10 years ago, and coincidence or no coincidence, his Bosso team went on to win the league championship and that is why there is so much value in winning this match, the confidence it brings into the players, the unity it brings in their camp and the spring it brings in their step.

LLOYD MUTASA RETURNS TO HOME BITTER HOME

The last time Lloyd Mutasa took charge of a DeMbare game at Rufaro, two weeks ago, he was heckled by a mob that still believed he had played a role in Silva’s dismissal and his men were, for the first time in living memory, rejected by their fans who, instead, gave a standing ovation to an FC Platinum side that had pummelled them into submission.

How ugly this beautiful game can become.

Just five years ago, Mutasa walked out of the same stadium with Rufaro exploding in praise-singing that bordered on hysteria, labelling him their Pep Guardiola, their Special One, their Unique One, after he masterminded that 4-1 destruction of Algerian side MC Alger in a CAF Champions League tie.

On an unforgettable afternoon when the Glamour Boys bewitched their fans with a free-flowing display of football dripping in purity, and some beautiful goals to savour, with Denver Mukamba at the very peak of his athletic powers before he lost his way in Super Diski, conducting an orchestra that produced a melody that would have made Pavarotti proud, Mutasa was hailed as the technical magician.

But after the heights of that afternoon, his train began to go off the rails and a few months later he had been hounded out of the Glamour Boys, amid rebellion in the stands, to be replaced by Pasuwa, who would go on to build a legacy of success stories short on beauty, but long on substance.

Mutasa is back in the DeMbare trenches and, as he walked off the pitch after that loss to FC Platinum, I saw him try to wave to the crowd on the Mbare Stand who, in response, rejected him and bombarded him with a wave of insults, holding him responsible for that loss to the Zvishavane side.

Outside Rufaro, there was pandemonium, but Mutasa refused to walk away, arguing he had only coached a team terribly short on confidence for just two days following Silva’s dismissal, and calling for a united front to turn things around.

In his next game, in a City of Kings where the Dynamos fans have generally been more appreciative of their team, because the Glamour Boys rarely lose there, and more supportive of their cause, because they have been spoiled by a number of good results, Mutasa found good company and, together, they somehow managed to get a win over Tsholotsho and, crucially, keep a clean sheet.

Today he returns to Rufaro for a game he knows means a lot to the fans and if he can guide his men to a victory, then the horror of that afternoon against FC Platinum will be forgotten, consigned to the history books, replaced by a beautiful romance.

That’s the way it is Lloyd in this game, and you have been around long enough, to know it’s about results and that is why your namesake, Chitembwe, is being feted like a king across the road at CAPS United, because he has brought a winning mentality to the club and made the Green Machine believe once again that they could be on the path to glory.

Even on the occasions that they don’t win, as was the case last Saturday at Rufaro against ZPC Kariba when they trailed Mhofu’s men by two goals at the interval, Makepekepe still found a way to fight back for a point and that is what the fans want from their players, that fighting spirit, that never-say-die spirit, that indomitable spirit.

Not what we were seeing from that ghost called LVG, a candle in the wind, a walking shadow, a poor coach who wasted his hour upon the big stage and will be heard no more, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but which ultimately signified nothing.

To God Be The Glory

Come on Warriors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Khamaldinhooooooooooooooooo!

Text Feedback – 0772545199

WhatsApp Messenger – 0772545199

Email – [email protected]

Skype – sharuko58

  • Chat with me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @Chakariboy, interact with me on Viber or read my material in The Southern Times. The authoritative ZBC weekly television football magazine programme, Game Plan, is being refreshed and we off air for now

You Might Also Like

Comments

Take our Survey

We value your opinion! Take a moment to complete our survey