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semi-finals of the Mbada Diamonds Cup, should be a cause for celebrations.
All good things must come to an end at some point and, as much as it hurts, we have to say goodbye to a domestic Premiership season rich in substance and long in entertainment that held us spellbound all year.

Take a bow, ladies and gentlemen, to a landmark 2011 Castle Premiership season that brought out the best in our flagship football league in a landmark year that could prove the turning point from a state of perpetual poverty into one of abundant riches.
From the arrival, on the scene, of a team so rich in financial resources it did not only buy the best players available but even lured Rahman Gumbo for a homecoming show, to a championship battle that went to the wire and was decided by goal difference.

What more could we have asked for really?
Take a bow, ladies and gentlemen, to the men whose Midas Touch helped the Premiership transform itself from a league that was wanted by nobody, including our own ZBC, into one that could attract the interest of pay-per-view television giant SuperSport.

Large parts of Africa watched live as Motor Action and Dynamos clashed in an historic Premiership tie, the first local top-flight league match to be screened live on SuperSport, on an unforgettable Wednesday that could mark the turning point in this league’s battle for a better future.
Take a bow, ladies and gentlemen, to the men whose leadership qualities overhauled a Premiership, which used to be so short on sponsors that its championship ran

unbranded last year, into one that now had sponsorship running into millions of dollars.
Twine Phiri might have his faults, just like all of us, given our human frailty that stalks us in everything we do, but you have to give him his credit for the manner he has

delivered on his pre-election promise to turn around the fortunes of our Premiership.
Take a bow, ladies and gentlemen, to the men whose skills helped illuminate our football fields and brought the fans back to the stadiums the Dynamos/CAPS United derby became too big for Rufaro and a DeMbare/Kiglon game attracted a full house at the same stadium.

From a ginger-haired striker who arrived at Dynamos virtually clueless of how to lead the line at the country’s biggest football team, and ended the year as the Golden Boot winner, to the refreshing feel-good story of seeing Norman Togara enjoying a semblance of stability, for once, at FC Platinum.
Sekuru Gudo, or Washington Arubi as his parents chose to call him, was outstanding in a red letter year for goalkeepers with the ageless Marlon Jani, still going strong a dozen years after his beloved Blackpool collapsed, and the impressive Tafadzwa Dube, all producing outstanding performances.

Munyaradzi Diya, remember him, even powered Zimbabwe Saints to the semi-finals of the Mbada Diamonds Cup, thanks to his heroics between the posts that powered Chauya Chikwata to memorable penalty shootout wins, before their fairy-tale came to an end in the rain at Sakubva.
Who will write Callisto Pasuwa’s story, and do it with both authority and clarity it will capture all the drama that unfolded – a rookie gaffer having the guts to take his first job, as head coach, in the melting pot of the Dynamos politics poisoned by a poor championship challenge where the Glamour Boys were 10 points adrift with games running out?

Find me a writer who will put all this in words and bring out the true picture of the miracle that Pasuwa performed – winning nine of the 11 league matches he was in charge of, drawing one in the cauldron of the Colliery where his charges had a goal controversially disallowed and losing one in Masvingo when the Warriors took away Sekuru Gudo and Cuthbert Malajila.
Just four goals conceded in 11 league matches for Pasuwa, only four in 990 minutes, at an incredible average of a goal conceded every 247.5 minutes for his team or, better still, in just about every four hours of action – absolutely as magical, defensively, as any local team will play on home soil.
Twenty three goals for his Glamour Boys, in that same period, and that gives you an average of four goals per every league game that Pasuwa, a man you will never find courting the glitz of the media and who prefers to let his work do the talking, delivered for the DeMbare fans.
Simply sensational!

How Do We Ignore Bambo?
Who will write Moses Chunga’s story, and do it with both authority and clarity it will capture all the drama that unfolded – from his flying start at CAPS United to his fallout with the club’s fans and eventual exit right down to his return to a Gunners team so devoid of ideas at that stage they didn’t only look hopeless but possibly helpless.
Enter Bambo.
Almost 18 months had passed since Chunga walked away from Gunners, leaving them as champions who were now dining on the top table of African football and sharing a meal with Egyptian aristocrats Al-Ahly, and now he was returning to find them bottom of the Premiership. They say teams that are bottom of the Premiership, at the halfway stage, usually don’t survive.

Well, sixteen games later, Gunners had won 10 games under Chunga, drawn two and lost four and, what had been a dog-fight against relegation, had long turned into a battle for a place in the top three by the time the season spilled into the final countdown.
In the end, Gunners could only finish fifth but, considering where they were at the halfway stage of the season, that was an incredible turn-around.

And, in one of the most decisive games of this championship battle, they turned on the style to beat FC Platinum at Lafarge for a result that eventually had a huge bearing on the outcome of the race.

In the 16 matches that he took charge of Gunners, they took home 32 out of 48 points and only the eventual champions, Dynamos, were better with 36 points in the second half of the season.

Chunga’s overall points haul this season, including the 13 games he spent at CAPS United, came to 54 points – and that is just four points behind the winning tally of 58 points that DeMbare needed to win the league championship.

Gunners were the team with the smallest budget in the entire Premiership this season and, as they struggled for funding at some point during the course of the marathon, there were even fears that the team could fail to complete the race.

Their challenges were mirrored by the way they struggled in the league until Chunga arrived and changed all that, finding a way to inspire the boys that everyone said were flops, and bringing out the best in a group of young and talented players who flourished under his guidance.

Suddenly, we were all talking about Cliff Sekete, as if he had not been playing for Gunners in the first half of the season, we were all talking about the goal-scoring instincts of Leonard Fiyado, as if he had just arrived on the scene in the second half of the season, and we now knew there was someone called Mitchell Katsvairo.

Somehow, Chunga inspired a team with the smallest budget in the league, which had looked hopelessly out of depth in the first half of the season, into fifth place on the table at the end of the campaign.

How do we ignore the exploits of such a man and whether we love him or hate him is immaterial here because the facts speak for themselves and, as they usually said, the league table doesn’t lie.

In Hwange They Have A Good Tenant
Zambian players and coaches have done considerably well on the occasions they have crossed the Zambezi for a stint with our Premiership.
Derby Mankinka took the game to another level here, at the turn of the ‘90s, in the colours of Wieslaw Grabowski’s Darryn T and his death, in that plane crash off the coast of Gabon in ’93, touched many lives in this country.

Webster Chikabala brought along a bag of skills, and a load of controversy, but his talent shined through the fog created by his controversial escapades and he will always be remembered here as a good player and a fine coach.
Pity that, just like Mankinka, he is also late.
Ian Bakala played a huge role in CAPS United’s success story in 2004 when the Green Machine finished the season unbeaten on the road and lost only one league game, 3-4 to Highlanders at the National Sports Stadium, all year round.

Laughter Chilembe also played his part, and left a mark, while Keegan Mumba would certainly have ended Dynamos’ wait for a league championship, after the turn of the millennium, earlier than when they finally won it in 2007.
In an era when MTN and SuperSport’s money have turned Zambian clubs into teams capable of paying enough wages for their players to remain on home soil than cross the Zambezi into Zimbabwe, the number of Chipolopolo boys playing here has dramatically gone down.

But in the coalfields of Hwange, a Zambian coach, not as media-conscious as Mumba, who turned himself into a short-lived newspaper columnist during his time here, and certainly not as controversial as Chikabala, is quietly leading a revolution to take the coalminers back to where they belong.

Tenant Chilumba, who turned 39 on August 2 this year, has done wonders at Hwange, working with average but committed players and turning them into a team – once they understood his philosophy – that was the third best performing side in the second half of the season.
Hwange finished fourth in the league this season and, just try to find out when was the last time they were that high up on the table, and you might get lost in the Google search.

Just as well, Tenant is turning into a success story.
Fate made him survive what was supposed to be a date with death in April ’93 when a delayed arrival in Lusaka, from his base in Saudi Arabia, where he was playing professional football, meant that he missed the chartered Airforce of Zambia flight when it departed on its ill-fated journey to Senegal.

Tenant arrived in Lusaka two hours after the plane, carrying the bulk of the Chipolopolo team set to play Senegal in a World Cup qualifier, had left.
Hours later, news filtered through that the plane had crashed, off the coast of Gabon during take-off after a refueling stop-over, killing everyone on board, including Derby

Mankinka, Godfrey “Ucar’ Chitalu, a legendary ‘70s goal-scorer who was now coach, and the brilliant Alex Chola.
Tenant went on to play in the ’94 Nations Cup for Chipolopolo and his team, rebuilt from the ashes of their dead comrades who were killed in the Atlantic, heroically went on to reach the final of the tournament in Tunisia only to lose 1-2 to Nigeria.

Many of those Zambian heroes, who found the courage to represent their country with such distinction in Tunisia against the background of a tragedy that touched a continent, seem to have used that life-changing experience to become tougher mentally and become success stories in life.

Kalusha Bwalya is another prime example from that team. Well done Tenant and it’s good to see the people in Hwange smiling again because they really love their team and this football club has a legacy that needs to be upheld. We were young boys then, growing up in the goldfields of Chakari in the ‘70s, but we knew Nyaro Mumba,

Posani Sibanda, Rodreck Simwanza, Barry Daka – the gems of Chipangano who represented greatness when it came to football.
Somehow, that magic had gone but Tenant has brought continental inter-club football back to Hwange and, oh yes, next year Chipangano will be playing in the Caf Confederation Cup. What a good tenant to have in your community this Zambian fellow.

Spare A Thought For FC Platinum
There are many football fans and analysts who somehow believe, in their flawed assessment, that FC Platinum were monumental failures in their maiden dance with the Premiership.

These people seem to base their arguments on the premise that FC Platinum had the financial weight to not only buy the best players but also keep them happy and they also lured one of our best coaches back home to guide their project.
But I believe it’s unfair for people to believe that a second-place finish in the championship, beaten only by goal difference in a contest that could have gone either way, is a bad return for a new team in the Premiership.

Yes, some of the players had won the league before, which probably makes FC Platinum a new team in name only, but ask the best football analysts and they will tell you that the hardest player to motivate to win the league is the one who has won it the previous year.
Yes, some will say they let Dynamos claw their way into what was once a 10-point advantage, with just 11 games to go, but I tell the same people that they quickly forget that – at the same stage – FC Platinum were involved in an energy-sapping war of attrition with Motor Action who were always within striking distance.

The pressure that was exerted by the Mighty Bulls has quickly and conveniently been forgotten by many, but I haven’t, and I know that it took its toll on both FC Platinum and Motor Action and was chiefly responsible for the run of poor form for both sides.
To their eternal credit, Dynamos played well when Pasuwa came and took their challenge with the spirit of true Glamours Boys but it’s not every year that you find a team going on a run where it wins nine of its last 11 matches, loses just one and draws the other.

So, in my little book where I record events, FC Platinum did as best as they possibly could have done and, had they been offered 58 points at the start of the season, they would have taken it.

FC Platinum’s incredible season, in which they finished with the same number of points as the champions and reached the semi-finals of the Mbada Diamonds Cup, should be a cause for celebrations rather than be turned into something that will poison their end-of-season period. When it came to the crunch, really, they were unlucky and to suffer defeat, in that big game against Dynamos at Mandava, from a goal headed home by their own man, in a game were a draw would have virtually turned them into champions, was as hard as it gets when it comes to ill-fortune.

But that should be taken as a learning curve, rather than something that brings disunity into a camp that showed all of us, that a Zimbabwean football team could scale the heights of professionalism, just like what we see in South Africa, and blazed a trail, for others to follow. There is no humiliation in coming second, especially in a race decided by goal difference, and FC Platinum have to pick themselves up because, boy oh boy, they have the capacity to do that and, while this year they couldn’t get to the

Promised Land, patience should be their guiding virtue.
After all, Dynamos spent two seasons coming second and then, last year, ended up as the bridesmaids in a race that was also decided by goal difference but they picked their lessons and, today, here they are – proud champions of Zimbabwe once again.

Therefore, if Dynamos can do it, after what happened to them last year with the goal difference issue, why can’t FC Platinum do it too?
The last thing that FC platinum will need is to rock their boat, change coaches again, make wholesale changes to their playing personnel and change this and that because, as they showed this year, they certainly have the capacity to win the league championship.

Yes, they have critics but that always comes with challenging the establishment and, boy oh boy, FC Platinum really shook the establishment this year and provided a refreshing oasis for the neutrals tired of the dominance of the old order.

Let’s give them their due guys because they fought like true warriors, right to the very end, and while they can blame themselves for losing that big game at home against Dynamos, where a draw would have given them the league title, true football guys know that such heartbreak is part and parcel of this game.
Rise FC Platinum rise.

Yes, you lost the big one but you charmed the hearts of many neutrals and you changed the lives of many Zimbabwean footballers tired of living from hand to mouth and I was impressed, when I came to Zvishavane, to see that virtually each and every player on your payroll has a car and a nice apartment.

History Repeats Itself
I was just going through my records and realised that there was a striking similarity to the way Dynamos won the league championship this year and the way they won it in 1995.

Back then Blackpool, just like FC Platinum today, were making their bow in the Premiership and came in with lots of big money and added a lot of colour to the game.
Check the points tally for Dynamos in ’95 and 2011, check the number of wins in ’95 and 2011 and check the number of defeats in ’95 and 2011.
Check the points tally for FC Platinum in 2011 and compare them with Blackpool in ’95, check the number of wins for both teams and the number of defeats.
Incredible similarity!

1995 Zimbabwe Premiership Top Five
P      W    D    L    F       A      Pts

Dynamos	30	17	7	6	54	29	58
Blackpool	30	17	7	6	50	25	58
Black Aces	30	16	5	9	45	25	53
CAPS Utd	30	15	7	8	46	28	52
Zim Saints	30	15	7	8	52	36	52

2011 Zimbabwe Premiership Top Five

 

CLUB	P	W	D	L	F	A	Pts
Dynamos	30	17	7	6	42	15	58
FC Platinum	30	17	7	6	44	21	58
Motor Action	30	13	12	5	33	18	51
Hwange	30	14	8	8	31	23	50
Gunners	30	12	8	10	37	30	44

Joke Of The Week
An IT Explanation Of Birth
Little boy: “Dad, how was I born?” Dad: “Well son, your mom and hooked up at Facebook. We set up a date via e-mail and met in a cybercafe. Your mom agreed to download data from my pen drive and I put it in your mom’s USB port and just when I was about to transfer, we realised that none of us had installed an ANTIVIRUS or

FIREWALL. It was too late to hit ‘Cancel’ and nine months later a ‘Pop-up’ window appeared saying: ‘You’ve got ‘Male.’
Wow!

Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicharitoooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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