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Phillip Zulu Special Correspondent

THE beginning of every new year is a time for hope and rejuvenation of one’s spirits.

But in light of the Africa Cup of Nations finals kicking off at the weekend and our first fixture in Group B against Senegal on Monday, our optimism about punching above our weight in top African football feels febrile and rampant disillusionment.

Our Warriors have qualified for the AFCON tournament for the fifth time and conscious of the desires, hopes and ambitions of the wider football fraternity, that includes primarily the fans and players, this coming fixture against Senegal is a huge test to cleanse our football of all the mafia gangsters holding fort in the Technical Department of ZIFA.

Hats off to the Sports and Recreation Commission for their bold stance in the efforts to bring normalcy. Now it stands: SRC 1-0 ZIFA Cartels United, as the battle of cleansing administrative thugs in the corridors of power at 53 Livingstone Avenue continues.

Long may we celebrate this short-term victory so that it spurs our hopes of further purges downstream where the last despicable acts of football capture and thuggery are thriving and intact as shoddy agents and player management cartels are running amok.

This Monday’s fixture against Senegal is not a football contest but the right moment for our Warriors to undergo a clean wash-up (the need for a total dismantling of the whole Technical Department) so that we can start from a clean slate and allow a new consensus to build strategic pillars for posterity.

Lest we forget, FIFA have not banned us as per its January 3 deadline for the Sports Commission to reinstate the suspended ZIFA board. The victorious path against thuggery is on the rise and we should galvanise our efforts to boot the mafia still strangling our football for personal gains.

An introspection of the Chelsea v Liverpool game on Sunday where the very best of Senegalese players hogged the limelight in both teams (Sadio Mane of Liverpool and Edouard Mendy of Chelsea), their five-star performances in brilliant attacking and conversely, in defending their goal, humbled one pundit as he termed this fixture as the ‘’zenith of the English Premier League’’.

This is what happens when natural talent is tapped from the dusty roads, carefully nurtured and mentored, then progressed for top-flight global modern football leagues.

What is happening in Zimbabwe is pathetic, a horror movie co-starring despicable agents and player management cartels that have captured football, inviting their poor 28-year-old players to be ‘’marketed’’ against such crème de la cream of world football.

The Madagascar national team projected the narrative of using players in lower leagues in Europe far much better than any other country in recent years. Without any doubt, the likes of Senegal have surpassed this notion since they have evolved after their bragging rights with France in World Cup 2002 when they beat them 1-0.

Senegal have allowed their local and foreign-based players to feel wanted and raise their country’s flag highest. Their meritocracy is their epitome of success and progress as they are ranked No. 1 in Africa and 20 globally under FIFA world rankings.

Contrast that with Zimbabwe, the selection of the national team is under mafia gangsters and cartels who are busy inviting their dross and vacuously parading them as ‘’national team players’’, by using public funds for such personalised adventures.

This is the third tournament that we have witnessed such an intricate web of this despicable agent who has single-handedly devoured our game. We have never had a free reign as a nation to get our players selected on merit because of his intrusive behaviour and diabolical capture of the national teams, from the Under-17s to the senior squads.

Let the battle begin and then we can expose his shenanigans that have destroyed our football.

Our football has been strangled. What Senegal has in its domain is what we could be in the next five years had our football been allowed to grow outside these filthy cartels running amok. We have a far more expansive terrain of youngsters playing in the English leagues from Conference divisions, league 2, 1 and Championship teams but, this narrative has been devoured by the cartels as they subverted it to mean that an NFD league in South Africa is our ‘’panacea’’.

Madagascar had less quality but they had national pride to allow merit to prevail, in Zimbabwe we have both but the cartels have hijacked the national teams, so whatever takes place on Monday against Senegal is not our full representation of how players should be selected.

We have Denver Mukamba, by far the best player in Zimbabwe and he wasn’t chosen because he is not represented by any of these cartels of agents and player managers.

Young Bill Antonio should have been allowed to go to AFCON and feel the buzz of being with Sadio Mane on the same pitch so that he could slowly adapt to the bigger international tournaments of football.

For once, I applaud the Sports Commission for its stance against these mafias, keep the fire burning for the next round after Senegal so that we flush all these thugs out without delay.

** Phillip Zulu is a UK-based Zimbabwean football coach and writes in his personal capacity.