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IT took us exactly a dozen years of heartbreaks and a chain of coaches to end the Ben Koufie curse that the Warriors would never qualify for the Nations Cup, even if we hired a super coach from the moon. Sunday Chidzambwa and his trailblazing Warriors, led by the greatest Warrior of all-time Peter Ndlovu, consigned the curse into the history books exactly 12 years after Koufie had told us that it will never happen in our lifetime.

At least, we ended that curse, and tomorrow we will start a new Nations Cup qualifying campaign, in Tanzania, knowing that we are not fated to fail and, in the unlikely event that we don’t make it to Morocco next year, we can’t blame Koufie anymore.

Portuguese giants Benfica, the club that gave Eusebio a platform to transform himself from a poor Mozambican boy into one of world football’s all-time greatest players, haven’t been as lucky.

In 1962, Benfica fired their Hungarian coach, Bela Guttman, after he had demanded a pay rise, having led the team to a second successive win in the European Cup.
Guttman left but not before telling the world, in a chilling prophecy, that “NOT IN A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW WILL BENFICA EVER BE EUROPEAN CHAMPIONS.”

Fifty two years later, the Guttman curse remains alive and on Wednesday night it struck again as Benfica lost the Europa Cup final after a penalty shoot-out defeat to Spanish side Sevilla.

It was the EIGHTH major European Cup final that Benfica have played in, since Guttman made his prophecy, and the EIGHTH time the Portuguese giants have LOST. AC Milan beat them 2-1 in the European Cup final in 1963, a year after Guttman’s prophecy, two years later they lost 0-1 to Inter Milan in the final of the same tournament and, in 1968, they were beaten 1-4 by Manchester United, after extra-time, in the final.

Benfica reached the European Cup final in 1988 and lost 5-6, in another penalty shoot-out, to PSV Eindhoven, and two years later they were on the losing end of another final, 0-1, to AC Milan.

Add to this, the 1983 Uefa Cup final they lost to Anderlecht and the 2013 Europa Cup final they lost to Chelsea and you have EIGHT appearances in the finals of the major European Cups, since Guttmann left, and EIGHT defeats for Benfica.

English football side, Derby County suffered the Curse of the Baseball Ground, after the stadium was built on an area that was used as a camping site for Romani gypsies, and for 51 years, the club failed in the semi-finals of the FA Cup 13 times, failing on each occasion, and three times they reached the final of the same tournament and lost on each occasion, which included a 0-6 thrashing at the hands of Bury in the 1903 final.

When Derby County reached the FA Cup final in 1946, representatives of the club went to meet the gypsies and, in that game against Charlton Athletic, the score was 1-1 and when the match ball burst, there was a feeling among the Derby fans that the curse had been lifted and, as if on cue, their team went on to win 4-1, ending 51 years of a nightmare.

And this isn’t restricted to football alone.
In 1945, when Billy Sianis, the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, was ordered to leave a World Series baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and Detroit Tigers because his pet goat had a smell that other spectators couldn’t stand and his protest, as he grudgingly left, was “THEM (CHICAGO) CUB, THEY AIN’T GONNA WIN NO MORE.”

Well, almost 70 years later, the Cubs have never won the National League pennant, the title given to the team with the best performance in Major League Baseball national league every season, and are yet to win the World Series in 106 years.

Thank God We Aren’t Cursed
This year marks the 10th anniversary of that golden moment when the Warriors came of age, finally playing on the big stage of the Nations Cup for the first time and impressing millions of neutrals, who watched their maiden game with their committed display in a losing cause against Egypt.
Of course, in our poisoned football environment, remembering the heroes of 2004 isn’t something that is encouraged because it puts into perspective our current, and recent, failures and celebrates the role the likes of Chidzambwa played in our game, something which is taboo for some of our leaders.

Tunisia 2004 was supposed to be the beginning, Egypt 2006 was supposed to be the next giant step forward but the Warriors’ fans have watched, with considerable frustration, as their team has failed to build on the promise that the two appearances in Tunisia and Egypt brought. But Tunisia and Egypt provided us with the reality that we aren’t cursed, that we have players good enough to play at the Nations Cup and, crucially, local coaches — for all our experiments with expatriates — hold the key.

Four years ago, our football leaders went back to a tried-and-tested formula of handing the technical leadership responsibilities of the Warriors to a local coach, something that Sunday proved works and something that Charles Mhlauri confirmed works, by taking the Warriors to the Land of the Pharaohs.
When Norman Mapeza, may the good Lord bless this young man and cast away the demonic spirits that have stalked his career in the past two years, reducing the finest young football technical brains we had in this country to just what Shakespeare would call a “walking shadow”, started his journey with a 1-1 draw away in Liberia, this strangely didn’t win him universal approval within the Zifa leadership.

Exactly a month later, ahead of our first home game against Cape Verde, there was commotion, Tom Saintfiet was airlifted from Namibia and by the time Match Day arrived, we capped a dramatic week, complete with deportations, with our first flirtation with a co-coaching line-up, a set-up which Zobha called, comically, as one coach for the first half and another for the second half.

Two points were lost at home and, from there onwards, there was no rescuing a campaign with only two points in the bag, from a possible six in the first two matches, and a tough away trip to Mali being the next assignment.

Refreshingly, we seem to have learnt our lessons and this week, in the countdown to our first 2015 Nations Cup assignment in Tanzania, we didn’t see the rampant chaos that blighted our first home match, four years ago, against Cape Verde and where there was friction in the past, now we had leaders ready to play peacemakers.

People who not only had the presence of mind to see the bigger picture — that our quest to qualify for the Nations Cup superseded everything else, including our little egos inflated by a flawed sense of self-importance — but the wisdom to appreciate what it represented and, crucially, the foresight to pursue the national agenda at the expense of personal interests. A leader like Omega Sibanda who brought Ian Gorowa and Jonathan Mashingaidze to the round table and told them frankly that the national interests were more important than their personal fight and, in the week that the Warriors would embark on a new adventure to try and qualify for the Nations Cup finals, he wouldn’t tolerate leading a family severely crippled by divisions.

And he didn’t only want them to have a handshake at 53 Livingstone Avenue because, as far as he was concerned, this was more than just a private issue for the organisation and two of its most senior employees but a national issue that needed a national arena.

No one won this feud, the healing process wasn’t about looking for winners and losers, but bringing two key people in an organisation together so that they look beyond the small picture, the small horses, and begin to appreciate the bigger picture, the bigger horse, and serve a nation that expected more from them.
To me that is what leadership is all about, imposing yourself on a public organisation, resolving the challenges facing the organisation, mending the cracks, strengthening the structures and ensuring that the arrogant pursuit of petty personal interests isn’t promoted at the expense of bigger national interests.

Only yesterday Gorowa was calling Mashingaidze a habitual liar and only yesterday Jonathan was questioning Ian’s professionalism, in the way the Umbro kit deal was secured, but on Sunday the two gentlemen realised that the wider interests of the Warriors were bigger than their fallout. And Dibango emerged out of the meeting to say he was happy to let bygones be bygones.

After all, he told me, he didn’t make the big decision to return to work in his homeland to create enemies but to try and add value to the Warriors’ brand, to try and give back to football and help the game take a giant leap of faith forward because he always feels indebted to this sport for giving him a way out of grinding poverty, in the Mbare flats as a child, to a future where his kids can lead a decent life.

For all the negativity generated by all those articles emanating from the Zifa secretariat over the Umbro deal, and the reports they fed the media that a new kit deal with be struck soon after companies had tendered, the Warriors have just spent the entire week, preparing for the Tanzania tie, using the Umbro kit.

It’s very likely, and I will be surprised if this isn’t the case, they will start their 2015 Nations Cup campaign in Tanzania tomorrow wearing the same Umbro kit that became a source of so much controversy, and unfortunately, inflicted collateral damage on the reputation of an international company that only tried to help us and made us look quite smart at CHAN.

The Warriors are bigger than Mashingaidze, bigger than Gorowa, bigger than the two of them put together, bigger than Zifa, bigger than Sharuko, bigger Mabika, bigger than all the football writers in this country put together and our little battles and little interests should NEVER be allowed to overshadow national interests.

We Can’t Keep Doing The Same Thing And Except A Different Result.In the past four years, regrettably, one gets the sinking feeling that there has been a relentless, if not selfish, blind pursuit of personal interests — let’s create this animal, but to do that we need to destroy this one and that one, let’s create our island but to do that we need to destroy this and that one, let’s create our organisation, different from any that has led the national game before, but to do that we need to silence this and that one.

We have promoted the emergence, and fuelled the growth, of an industry of people whose day job is to spread makuhwa, people who have become specialists of telling the football leadership that the whole world is against them, that we spend all our time plotting their downfall, their destruction. We turned it into a profitable industry because these people didn’t just do it as a charity service but reaped some benefits from the exercise, including financial ones, and the more they earned the more they plunged deeper into their industry and the bigger the conspiracy web that they knitted and the truth became irrelevant, as is always the case in such adventures.

The more this underworld fed from what was thrown at it, the more that it grew and became a big part of our football, specialising in sowing divisions, of course, for a certain fee, and they spread a lot of lies about plots, the majority of which were a figment of their imagination.

They succeed in pushing our fragile football leadership into a corner where it was given a daily briefing that this and that guy were plotting to destroy them, this and that fellow were working on destroying them, this and that buddie were in the company of bad people who wanted to destroy this Zifa leadership.

They were the first to read the newspapers, looking for any article that would push their agenda, and they became specialists in twisting the meaning of things that were printed, all the time ensuring that it suited their evil agenda, and in the process people who were supposed to appreciate criticism, and use it to become better administrators, immunised themselves from all this.

They even created their specialist media team, the good guys who were presented to the leadership as the nice fellows, trusted lieutenants, who could be relied upon to help them win this imaginary war and when my colleague Lovemore Dube arrived at a hotel in Harare, on the eve of the Zifa board elections, he was told, in uncertain terms, that he was from the wrong team of journalists.

He was told by the leader of the so-called Friends of the Warriors, Lyn Green, that he was part of the group that the Zifa leaders didn’t like, and he was told he was hated as much as they hated Sharuko, and threats were even issued, by parasites who had become specialists in spending their days and nights drinking beer at no cost as part of their mission, that they were going to deal with us.

The Friends of the Warriors left for Tanzania on Thursday, just a few hours after it was published in the newspapers that Government was providing a bus, and you feel for all the other bona-fide fans, who would have loved to go and support their team, but can’t find a way into this exclusive club.

Last Wednesday, in the dead of the night, Lovemore Dube, who is the Senior Sports Editor of the Chronicle, raised alarm when he posted on his Facebook page: “Oh God protect me from intruders by my door.”

There was a reaction, from people who care for him, with someone even sending some neighbourhood watch fellows to stand guard over his house all night.
Two days later, Dube posted another message and, for the first time, identified who had threatened him:

“It’s been a hectic week where my life was threatened. My real friends stood out for me, my family was there to share with me the threats by a ZIFA official,” he wrote.
“My colleagues showed their love, while haters took it upon themselves to stab my back as they have always done. It has not been easy though as I have had to alternate lapho engilala khona for security reasons.

“I stand by what I do for the common good of the masses, not a few. NO AMOUNT OF BEER CAN BUY MY STANCE ON ISSUES OF PRINCIPLE.”
Lovemore has since shifted his residence, to a more secure place, and believes he is now safer but, crucially, he has calmed down and yesterday he said something that made sense — forgive whoever was threatening him and, like Johnnie Walker, just keep walking.

“You knock off at work some day and you reflect on life and think of the strong teachings from childhood family, school and church and you (are) left saying in life ‘better to live a life without enemies, laugh off everything, be willing to forgive and do self introspection and say if in public office let me bury the past and do good to benefit the community and your chosen field’,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

“If I can be a vehicle for change and development, let soccer be the winner I will play my part with a fresh start with everyone.”
Thanks Lovemore for such incredible wisdom because, as I have been saying, the national interests are bigger than all our narrow and personal interests.
When Foolish Caf Belittles Its Flagship Tourney

You know that you are under Issa Hayatou’s pathetic leadership when the Nations Cup is devalued so much that its qualifiers are played on the same weekend as the Champions League fixtures.

Every team should have its best possible players for the Nations Cup and when a country has to lose its players to a team that is playing in the Champions League, you can understand why some of us believe that African football has really gone to the dogs.

This week Lufthansa, the German national carrier, announced that a new logo “Fanhansa” will be put on its planes in support of their national team ahead of the Fifa World Cup and that shows you how much other countries, and continents, take their national teams seriously.

Here in Africa, the same Stade Tata Raphael, where 15 football fans were killed in a stampede last weekend during the AS Vita/TP Mazembe league match in Kinshasa, will tomorrow be used for the Champions League game between Vita and Zamalek.

How foolish can our Caf leadership ever get really?
When you begin to devalue your flagship tournament will you cry when, next, European clubs hold on to their players during the finals of this tourney when you setting the precedent?

You might as well have realised that I didn’t plunge into the Willard Katsande/Kingston Nkhatha controversy, for a reason, because I feel this is a period when we should be building a lot of bridges, in our football and they might have let us down but let’s give them another chance, that’s what our game badly needs right now.
Our cartoonist, Knowle Mushohwe, doesn’t agree and his cartoon on this blog says it all but that’s the beauty of democracy. Oh, by the way, it would be unfair not to salute Highlanders and ZPC Kariba for a quality showdown at Gwanzura last Sunday which was a credit to our Premiership and, boy oh boy, Raphael Manuvire was awesome, incredibly awesome.

We have the talent, no doubt about that.
To God Be The Glory!
Come on Warriors !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mahachiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!
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