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Cuthbert Dube

Robson Sharuko Senior Sports Editor
ON Sunday, the Warriors matched their worst African Cup of Nations campaign in history, and you have to go back 32 years to our early days back on the international football scene, to find a similar miserable quest in which we fell at the first hurdle.
More than 50 000 fans packed the National Sports Stadium, while millions more followed the action live on national television, as the Warriors suffered the embarrassment of a first round exit in their bid just to make the group stages of the 2015 Nations Cup qualifiers.

Even before the heavyweights like Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon have started their 2015 Nations Cup journey, at a time when the real football family’s eyes are on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the Warriors are already out of the next Nations Cup finals.

This humiliation comes just a few months after the Warriors also completed their worst World Cup campaign, in history, as they failed to win any of the six matches they played in their pathetic quest to qualify for Brazil, twice losing at home, including a thrashing at the hands of Egypt.

This stunning decline, in which the Warriors found themselves playing, for the first time, in the preliminaries of the Nations Cup qualifiers, has come under the watch of Zifa president Cuthbert Dube and his trusted lieutenant Jonathan Mashingaidze, the chief executive of the association.

When Dube came into power in March 2010, the Warriors didn’t need to play in the preliminaries, in their quest to qualify for the Nations Cup, and most of their fans believe the team would have qualified for the finals in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon if the Zifa leaders hadn’t brought confusion within the coaching staff with their failed bid to hire Tom Saintfiet as head coach.

Ian Gorowa

Six coaches – Norman Mapeza, Madinda Ndlovu, Tom Saintfiet, Rahman Gumbo, Dieter Klaus Pagels and Ian Gorowa – have been appointed as head coaches of the Warriors, during the last four turbulent years, itself a sign of the confusion that has been rampant in the senior national team’s set-up.

But save for a good campaign in the 2014 CHAN finals, where a local crew of players surpassed expectations and went all the way to the semi-finals, only to lose to eventual winners Libya in a penalty shootout, there has been nothing positive to report from the field under Dube’s watch.

Even after that isolated CHAN success story, Zifa decided to shortchange the players and coaches who did well in those three weeks in South Africa and an agreement, which the team had struck with the association for the two parties to share equally the proceeds from the tournament, was violated by the game’s leadership.

The Warriors’ fortunes continue to nose-dive while the Young Warriors have been frozen out of international football after our Under-17 and Under-20 national teams were kicked out of the African Youth Championships – a crucial vehicle for players’ development – after Zifa failed to send them to play their reverse fixtures against Angola and Congo (Brazzaville).

In the wake of the Warriors’ elimination on Sunday, Zimbabwe now faces, at least, two years on the sidelines of international football with the Warriors and the Young Warriors only waiting for the regional assignments that come with the Cosafa Cup.

Interestingly, even after such a disaster, there was no official statement from Zifa yesterday to, at least, even apologise to the nation for the Warriors’ failure and, as has become his trademark, Dube was not even there at the National Sports Stadium on Sunday to support the team.

In his four years in charge, he has yet to watch even one Nations Cup/World Cup qualifier that the Warriors have played at home or away, and that’s 18 matches in total, including NINE at home and, for a man who claims to have this team at heart, these statistics appear to tell us a different picture of a disinterested observer.

On the eve of their game against Tanzania, the Warriors staged a protest by refusing to train because of issues related to their daily allowances, pegged at US$15, and the appearance fee where the association wanted to pay them US$700 while they wanted US$2 000.

It’s something that we have seen repeated now and again, when it comes to the Warriors in recent years, and on the eve of their CHAN semi-final against Libya, the team again refused to train in protest over unpaid allowances and, then just like now, their focus was deflected and all they could afford was a draw which wasn’t good enough.

When Dube surprisingly won re-election, as Zifa boss, there was outrage in the country as supporters of the game questioned how a man who had failed, in the first four years to do anything of note, with the Young Warriors stranded in isolation from international football while the Warriors had been reduced to a punching bags, could be brought back into power.

Those who supported Dube said he had impressed them by his bailouts of the Warriors from his pockets even though this was a yet another damning indictment of his failed leadership given that he had promised in his election manifesto to bring in dozens of sponsors into the game.

Some of the people who lost in those elections cried foul, claiming that some councillors had been paid to vote in a certain way, and while there is no proof that this is what happened, we believe that in the wake of the disaster at the National Sports Stadium, those who voted for Dube are sleeping soundly and still congratulating themselves for their anti-football show.

It’s very clear that Dube has no clue, whatsoever, to run a huge national institution like Zifa and when you have no international football to take care of, in half of your term, then we believe you have lost your legitimacy to retain that leadership of such a public organisation because the success of our national teams will always be the barometer on which the football association will be judged.

Jonathan Mashingaidze

The least that Dube and his chief executive can do is to resign now because, after the darkness of the last four years, and the disaster that happened at the National Sports Stadium on Sunday, surely, what will they be administering in the next two years?