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Phillip Zulu Special Correspondent

THE recent final selection of the 23-man squad to represent Zimbabwe at next month’s African Cup of Nations finals in Cameroon is terribly confounding and a high risk of turbulence in dissonance with dismal failure.

I won’t dangle with horoscopes or fortune telling about how the Zimbabwe national team will perform in Cameroon, or seek to raise false hopes for a ‘’miracle’’ against Senegal, Guinea and Malawi, our opponents in our group.

But, a sad reflection of the last 10 years can help us to project and forecast the pending outcomes based on our participation at the CHAN tournament in January 2021, qualification games for both the World Cup 2022 and AFCON 2021.

A no-holds-barred scenario has to transcend our lukewarm habitual partisan approach towards the scrutiny and criticism of our standards in these major tournaments, where the tremors of disaster and dissonance recorded on the football Richter scale, have more far more terrifying results of more of the same or worse.

We have changed the coaches, but the results have become worse, we keep inviting the same below average players who get their first senior national team caps at the ages of 27 years-plus and still, the ossillations of mediocrity get higher.

We are shocked to witness players coming from the NFD League in South Africa which is a second-tier division of a not-so-great league in top-flight football, then we have the ‘’gutsy and temerity’’ to pin our hopes on such average players?

We thought we had learnt something from Loga when he experimented on inviting players in their late 20s. A poignant reminder is Victor Kamhuka, who has since disappeared from the radar of football.

Football revisionists have taken over in full swing as we witness more of the same crass; we have Gerald Takwara, Ishmael Wadi and Temptation Chiwunga (on standby), all coming from the same obscure and lacklustre league in South Africa to play against Sadio Mane of Liverpool, Edouard Mendy of Chelsea, Kalidou Koulibaly of Napoli, Idrissa Gana Gueye of Paris St. Germain. Then the act of fortune telling on behalf of one’s country is a futile exercise and a terrifying indulgence, whether patriotism is at stake or not.

I beg to differ and state the obvious so that I can retain my football sanity without distortions, the NFD player base that has recently found its way in our senior national team selection is a sad reminder that our football understanding on a national coaching level is too embarrassingly outdated and it depicts a caricature of endemic gross failures.

Rocket science aside, how does one compare 27-year-olds heading for career nosedive to a 19-year-old Gerald Sithole playing for Gillingham in England and 18-year-old Michael Ndiweni (Newcastle United), who started training with first team recently?

I thought I would enjoy supporting my national football team and also show a modicum of patriotism towards positivity in everything that we seek to achieve at the highest levels of international football but, looking at final squad heading to Cameroon and the personnel that sanctioned this list, I am more than happy to dismiss it as a waste of time and abuse of  scarce pubilc resources.

To ever dream that we will watch a contest in football between those Senegalese superstars against our NFD-based players is just plain witchcraft. The route that the Senegal national football team has gone, is beyond any doubt of hallucinations as being shown in our projection of how not to run football.

In Senegal they allow their young players to progress to the senior team in conformity with the global modern trends of how football works but, in Zimbabwe, a cursory look at those NFD players one can easily see the sinister hand of the managers handling those players outside the field of play having too much influence and powers to get them included (in the Warriors squad).

This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t care what people say about ‘’our chances’’ but this is just another blot on our game and, we have to start thinking of the aftermath of humiliation and have to agree to a total revamp of the whole technical department of the national football team, our coaching standards and curriculum.

We are far too behind and the more we witness this pandemonium, the more we embarrass our nation in those tournaments. We failed dismally during CHAN, Qatar World Cup 2022 qualification and even, the AFCON qualifying fixtures had nothing much to show in terms of our quality.

We are currently ranked 121 on world football and our first fixture at next month’s AFCON finals is against a team ranked No. 1 in Africa and 20 in world football – Senegal.

We have to admit that we are far behind, we have to dismantle everything and start from scratch without intoxicated egos and hyped hollier than thou attitudes that permeate our national game, and we have to frankly engage serious counsel on how best to redesign our football to retrieve it from the deep dungeons that it keeps sliding into at every turn.