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THOMAS KWENAITE, one of the pundits on SuperSport’s weekly programme, Soccer Africa, on Thursday night said the Mighty Warriors could write one of football’s greatest fairy-tales if they qualify for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Given that chaos has become part of the DNA of domestic football, a leaderless game that has been operating on autopilot for the last five years, the mere fact that the Mighty Warriors now stand on the threshold of qualifying for the Olympic Games is one of this game’s greatest miracles. A team who, only a few months ago, appeared down and out of the qualifying battles after the ZIFA leaders failed to send them to Cote d’Ivoire for a showdown against the West Africans, somehow now find themselves just 90 minutes away from writing one of this game’s finest Cinderella tales.

Just as well, Cinderella is the tale of a poor and unfortunate young woman who overcomes her challenges, defying insurmountable odds and clearing huge hurdles along the way, on the way to achieving success that captures the imagination of the world.

Like Zambia, emerging from the disaster of that plane crash, off the coast of Gabon in ’93, which destroyed a generation of her finest footballers, and left scars that might not heal in a lifetime, to field a makeshift team, led by Kalusha Bwalya, which not only qualified for the ’94 Nations Cup finals, but reached the final and, for good measure, even took the lead against a very powerful Nigeria, before losing 1-2. The Mighty Warriors might not have flirted with tragedy, in this adventure for a samba dance with the game’s aristocrats at the Olympic Games in Rio next year, but such were the odds stacked against them, the dangers of the vast minefield they had to navigate, in a tough journey that tested them all the way, a triumph tomorrow might be remembered as one of football’s finest Cinderella tales.

A game that the domestic football leadership described as “petty”, in an astonishing attack not only on the Mighty Warriors but the women of this world, a game that has suffered immensely from the vicious boardroom battles that have pitted its leadership and people at 53 Livingstone Avenue, a game that remains scarred today simply because some of our game’s leaders would rather see it die than embrace some of its leaders.

A game that has two rival leagues because some of the clubs refused to be used as pawns in the boardroom battles between their leaders and some of the people who run our national game, now stands on the verge of producing a team that qualifies for the Olympic Games, the first time this has happened in our football. And they could become only the second representative national team from this country, after hockey’s Golden Girls in 1980, to make it to the Olympics.

For a team whose coach was fired midstream in the campaign, amid reports that she was being victimised for not carrying out certain orders to ignore players who were playing the league under former women football boss, Miriam Sibanda, to come this far, is a miracle that should be celebrated, irrespective of the result at Rufaro tomorrow.

As the Mighty Warriors stand on the threshold of writing a very special story, it’s easy to forget that these are the same players who, only recently, were being left stranded at the ZIFA Village, with barely enough to feed them, and no money for them to travel back home after they had eliminated Botswana in the African Women Championships.

God works in a lot of mysterious ways and here there are, today, on the verge of writing one of football’s greatest success stories and, of course, should they achieve it, you can be certain they will have a lot of many friends on their side.

Let’s pray for our Mighty Warriors so that they triumph tomorrow.

If we all believe then it can be done and, 22 years after the Indomitable Lions ended our Dream Team’s quest for a place at the ’94 World Cup in the United States, in controversial fashion in Yaounde, maybe the football gods could smile on us, this time, and – for a change – it’s the people of Cameroon who will shed tears this time around.

This article, published by this newspaper on Saturday as part of the weekly ‘Sharuko on Saturday’ column, proved both inspirational, to our heroic Mighty Warriors, and prophetic about their date with destiny