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On the morning of April 28, 1993, I accompanied my senior colleague, Sam Marisa, to the National Sports Stadium to cover the Dream Team during a hectic period for this group of special players, and their very special coach, as they stood on the threshold of greatness.

Four days earlier, they had played in Johannesburg, against Bafana Bafana, and pulled off a 1-1 draw, to stretch their unbeaten run in the ’94 Nations Cup and World Cup qualifiers, which had started with a 4-1 hammering of South Africa in Harare in August ’92, to an incredible 10 games.

Nine days before their match against Bafana Bafana in South Africa, the Warriors had also booked their place in the final round of the ’94 World Cup qualifiers, after a heroic defensive performance in Lyon, France, helped them salvage a goalless draw against Egypt.

Just five days before their make-or-break tie in Lyon, Reinhard Fabisch and his men had also been in Lusaka, for a ’94 Nations Cup qualifier against Zambia, and had battled their way to a goalless draw to keep alive their hopes of qualifying on both fronts.

Six weeks prior to their match in Lusaka, the Dream Team had played in Cairo where they had emerged out of an ill-tempered World Cup tie battered and bruised by an opponent that used every weapon available, including flying missiles from the stands, to try and destroy the indomitable spirits of this special group of players.

The good thing was that Fifa were watching and this Arabic version of World Wrestling Entertainment, complete with real flying missiles and real blood that oozed from deep cuts, could not pass the minimum test of Fair Play, when it comes to football, and the result was nullified.

In a rough and tough period of eight weeks the Dream Team had played four World Cup and Nations Cup qualifiers away from home, had been brutalised in Cairo but emerged out of that horror with their spirits intact to force a draw in a real match, the replayed tie in Lyon, been to Johannesburg and Lusaka, and came out of it all undefeated.

Their next game was only four days away and, just like the other four ties, was also away from home in Conakry where Fabisch and his Dream Team would swim in uncharted waters, for Zimbabwean footballers, as they plunged into the final qualifiers for a place at the World Cup.

Fabisch and his men were superheroes and their training sessions used to draw hundreds of people – men, women and children – to the National Sports Stadium and on the morning of April 28, I arrived there, in the company of my colleague Marisa, to cover the session.

The session had long ended, and we had been allowed our slots to talk to the players and their coaching staff, when Fabisch asked us to take a walk with him, away from his players and backroom crew, for a chat and before we knew it he had exploded.

He was walking away from the Dream Team, he told us, and we didn’t need a second invitation to realise that we had a big scoop on our hands, a best-seller of a story that would drive the circulation figures of the newspaper the next day, and we knew there and then, the two of us, that everything that we had done that day, the interviews with the players and the backroom staff, now paled into insignificance.

This was the Mother of All Stories, a superhero walking away from his project because he was being betrayed by Zifa who were jealousy of his achievements and the profile that he had built, and we captured every word he said that day, each word giving the story its true weight, and we left the giant stadium that day knowing we had a big scoop, not for our back pages, but for the front page.

Unless something dramatic happened, something that was beyond imagination, something catastrophic, we were so sure, as we drove back to the office, that we had a huge story that would make headlines on both the front and back pages of the next edition of The Herald.

Well, our scoop never made the front page, nor the back page, of The Herald the following day as Fabisch’s threat to quit the Warriors, just four days before the Dream Team played the biggest match in their history, was pushed into the shade by a disaster, of unimaginable proportions, which had happened off the coast of Gabon, the previous night.

Back then it wasn’t the age of Facebook and Twitter, breaking news did not travel as fast as it does today, radio and television coverage was not as developed as it is today, and news took hours, sometimes days, to spread around the world.

It was only when we arrived back at the office, around midday, when we got the first details of the disaster in which a generation of Zambia’s finest footballers, a group of men whom we had played just 18 days earlier in Lusaka, whom we were due to play once again in Harare, had perished after their chartered military plane came down into the Atlantic.

The sense of shock was pronounced, throughout the newsroom, because this felt exactly like our mass funeral, the lady who manned our front office was crying endlessly, about two or three colleagues, grown-up men whom I had never known to have any interest in football, shed tears, and even though I had been in the newsroom for about six months, it became apparent to me that this breaking story was bigger than anything I had seen being published during my time here.

Even though I was a rookie journalist then, I knew that Fabisch’s story had lost its weight, its meaning had been diluted to a very large extent and the Zambian tragedy, a tragic tale of footballers and coaches who had left their homes to serve their nation but never returned to tell their story, would dwarf everything else, and for a very good reason too.

Today marks 20 years since that Zambia Airforce De Havilland Canada DHC-5D Buffalo plane plunged into the Atlantic, shortly after take-off, killing 30 people, 18 players, four members of their coaching staff, Football Association of Zambia president Michael Mwape and journalist Joseph Bwalya Salim.

That tragedy will remain a big part of our football history, not because the Zambians are our good neighbours, but we created a lot of memories with those fallen legends, in our Nations Cup showdown in Lusaka that ended goalless just two weeks before disaster struck, and in the intensity of our battle for supremacy, our strong bond was shaped and our soul eternally connected.

That Kalusha Bwalya and a new group of players would come to Harare and deny us a place at the ’94 Nations Cup finals, in that drawn match in July that year, really hurt and there are thousands, if not millions, of Zimbabwean football fans who have marked that afternoon, for good measure, as the worst day in their romantic flirtation with football.

But beyond the excruciating pain of our failed campaign, amplified in a huge way by the realisation that our boys, like the Zambian team that rode a lot of its luck to deny them a ticket to Tunisia, would probably have gone all the way to grand final of the ’94 Nations Cup, lay the cold comfort that a country, whom nature had cursed so much in that tragedy in Gabon, could find comfort from the very game that had taken so much away from them.

It’s a measure of the strength of the bond that we share, as neighbours, as brothers, as sisters, as uncles and as fathers-and-mothers-in-law, that the Zambians have chosen us as opponents for a football game to mark the 20th anniversary of the day their nation was plunged into grief, and the world shared their pain, following the disaster in Gabon.

Twenty years down the line, it all feels like yesterday again, only that some things have changed.
My colleague Sam Marisa is late, and so is Reinhard Fabisch, and so is Francis Shonhayi, and so is Jonathan Nkonjera, better known in this country as Benjamin, and so is Mercedes Sibanda and so is Adam Ndlovu, members of the Dream Team, who were in that starting XI when Egypt fell 2-1 at the National Sports Stadium in a ’94 World Cup qualifier in December ’92.

But some things never change and then, just like now, we have a German coach and Dieter Klaus Pagels, who has taken his Warriors to Lusaka this weekend for this highly symbolic match, needs all the support that he requires because he appears a very focused man who has come here to help us develop our football.

All Hell Breaks Loose In The Battle Of Zimbabwe
At Rufaro last Sunday, just like that unforgettable tie between the Dream Team and Chipolopolo at the National Sports Stadium in July ’93, the league match between Dynamos and Highlanders ended in a 1-1 draw and there was a very, very late equaliser.

The Bosso family have been crying foul all week because they feel Partson Jaure’s last-gasp equaliser was not only diabolical, because they feel it was the product of a grand fraudulent act by referee Norman Matemera, but it was an insult to everything that this world’s most beautiful game is supposed to represent.
The key question to what happened on Sunday is – was Matemera justified to add the extra two minutes, to the four minutes that he had advised his fourth official to show to the stadium and the world, within which Jaure managed to grab DeMbare’s equaliser?

Given the emotions that have already gone beyond boiling point it’s a safe bet to suggest that noone will ever provide an analysis, no matter how sober it is, without attracting a brickbats of abuse, criticism and insults from whichever group feels that its interests, in that explanation, have been compromised.
Bosso chairman, Peter Dube, told The Chronicle that what happened at Rufaro was a disgrace and could not rule out the possibility of withdrawing his team from the Premiership, if that is the best course of action to preserve their interests and those of their fans.

Ndumiso Gumede, the Zifa Referees Committee boss, said incompetent match officials would be dumped into a freezer and not given matches to handle but the Zifa vice-president was careful to make it clear that his reaction was not, in any way, influenced by what happened at Rufaro.
Given his old role as Bosso chairman, Gumede probably knows only too well that statements issued in the heat of the moment, in such sensitive issues, could be misconstrued and given a totally different meaning to what would have been his intention.

Alois Bunjira, the former Zimbabwe international forward who is now a sports presenter on radio, challenged Matemera to prove to the nation where he picked the extra minutes and, after his comments were given huge prominence by The Chronicle, he has attracted quite a lot of brickbats from the Dynamos family.
That Bunjira is eternally tied to CAPS United, who also happen to be DeMbare’s biggest city foes, hasn’t helped matters, either, and has poisoned what was supposed to be a normal football debate.

Two big issues need to be explored, the moment when Mthulisi Maphosa went down for slightly more than a minute, in the second minute of time added on, and when captain Innocent Mapuranga also went down, on the field, in the dying seconds of the match.
Do those incidents, which stopped play in time added on, warrant the addition of two more minutes to what had been flagged by the fourth official and if that is the case, then Matemera was within his right to extend the life of the game beyond the four minutes of time added on.

I have taken my time to freeze the recorded version of the game, calculate the time lost, and then try and see if Matemera got it horribly wrong and, on my little watch, by the time the equaliser was scored, Matemera might have been offside, in terms of time allocation, by not more than 10 seconds.
DeMbare scored in the 96th minute and the other two minutes, which sees the game ending when the SuperSport timer is reading 98th minute, were devoured by the celebrations that followed the goal. Crucially, the law gives him the freedom to exercise his authority because it calls the time shown on the board as the minimum that could be added with adjustments possible if play was compromised.

If one can fault Matemera, probably it would be to say he should have called off the game before the corner kick had been taken, which has been done before, but to suddenly view a 10-second window as part of a conspiracy to either try to aid Dynamos, or destroy Highlanders, would stretching the imagination too far.
What we can’t hide away from is the brutal reality that the levels of match officiating, in our domestic Premiership leave a lot to be desired and there is need for something to be done to lift the standards.

The challenge we have is that while our players and coaching staff have all become professional, deriving a living out of football, our referees are still part-time and have other jobs elsewhere and it’s unfair that the fate of professionals should be determined by amateurs.

Matemera hasn’t helped matters, either, by hogging the limelight in controversial circumstances in two huge games – the league match between CAPS United and Black Rhinos, in which he awarded three penalties, including two to the Green Machine, and the Battle of Zimbabwe.

When Mthulisi Maphosa looks back at this game he will probably see that it needed a little bit of concentration, than showboating, and if he had invested his resources into focusing on winning, rather than delighting the gallery, chances are that Bosso’s first league win over DeMbare in seven years would have been secured.

It’s quite understandable and normal for the Bosso family to feel that the referee played a huge part in helping DeMbare get the point and it’s likely that the Glamour Boys’ family would have certainly felt the same, if the goal posts had been shifted, and it was the Harare giants who had conceded the goal within that time. But if we reduce this to a witch-hunt then we will see that there were monumental errors, which were defining to the outcome of the game, from the referee on both sides on Sunday.

Mike Madoda And His Tweets
Mike Madoda, who presents a sports show on Power FM with his long-time colleague, Barry Manandi, is a rare breed among the local sports journalists because, unlike others, he has declared his interests that he is a Highlanders supporter.

There is nothing absolutely wrong about that and another journalist, Ranga Mberi, questioned if it was unethical for local football writers to declare their favourite teams given than in England it’s normal for a journalist to say that he supports this team.

Ranga said as long as the local group of football writers retained their sense of objectivity, and ploughed a balanced line in coverage and criticism, their work will still be authoritative even when it’s known that they support this and that team.

Mike’s angry outburst, in which he publicly questioned the referees’ competency at Rufaro on Sunday, was highlighted in this newspaper on Tuesday and, since then, he has turned to Twitter for his responses, and raises some big issues, and these are some of them:

• ‘So Herald Sport complains that @mikemadoda is not an “impartial commentator?”   . . . the irony.’

• ‘It seems the only acceptable position in our media fraternity is to be a Dynamos fan. You can tarnish my image but you’ll never break my spirit’

• ‘The least you can ask of an article is for it to be factually correct. 2 things they get correct. 1. I am a Bosso fan. 2. What I was wearing.

• ‘At what point does one have access to match officials from the terraces? If I was supposedly on the stands, how did I swear to the officials?’

• ‘After the match I was on the field of play. I actually helped pull away the irate Highlanders players from match officials’

• ‘You’d think Dynamos won with all the s**t their fans are saying.’

• ‘Pasuwa has the ref to thank to be in a job today.’

• ‘Maybe Dynamos ought to stop b******g about Highlanders and concentrate on a s**t performance and another two points dropped.’

• ‘Dynamos were beneficiaries of bad refereeing but that’s no fault of their own – I place the blame squarely on our incompetent officials.’

• ‘Also don’t understand why Dynamos fans feel the need to defend the ref. This is not about DeMbare but about the s**t refereeing in Zim.’

Didn’t I say this is quite an emotional subject?
Fussball Is Coming Home To Wembley
The humiliating defeats suffered by Barcelona and Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-finals in Germany on Tuesday and Wednesday nights might have surprised many but those who have been following the Bundesliga closely were not shocked.

This is a league that has been on the rise, for some time now, has the best average attendance figures of any of the major leagues in Europe, has stadiums that are lively, clubs that are well managed and their top sides are not about individuals but about the collective talents of the individuals.
If Bayern Munich reach the final of this Champions League, it would be their third in the past four seasons and their second straight appearance and if that is not a mark of a team that is solid and efficient then maybe the two phrases have lost their meaning.

Borussia Dortmund are unbeaten, in the Champions League this season, and it’s easy to forget that they were in the same group as Real Madrid and never lost a tie, against the Spaniards, in their two encounters, winning one and drawing the other.

With Messi and Ronaldo still to take care of, in their backyard, these ties are not yet as dead as some might suggest but it was refreshing, for a change, to see clubs that depend on teamwork being rewarded and if Bayern and Borussia make it to Wembley, so be it.
Oh Yes, United Are Champs Once Again

It took Manchester United 88 years to win their first 10 league titles and, thanks to the magic of Sir Alex Ferguson, it has taken us just 17 years to win number 11 to 20 titles.
It’s only the sixth time that the title race has been won before May and United hold the record for the earliest triumph on April 14, with five matches to play, in 2001.
It’s only the third time that a team has won the championship race with four rounds of matches still to play and United are set to make it the sixth occasion the race has been won by a team with a double-figure points difference to the one in second place.

Interestingly, it’s only the third time United won the title at Old Trafford.
Robin Van Persie will get a guard of honour at the Emirates tomorrow but after the English FA’s foolish and outrageous decision to ban Suarez for 10 games, his triumph in the Golden Boot race will not taste that sweeter.
A United fan, Ngonidzashe Gumbo, turned 20 on Monday, the day his team won their 20th Premiership crown and his folks said they would be proud to read about that in this column. He must be a happy guy today.

To God Be The Glory!
Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicharitooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

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