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If you listen to the spin doctors, you will agree with them that there is a certain degree of foolishness, among those who cry loudest whenever we stumble in a Nations Cup campaign, because they will tell you that those blessed with wisdom have long stopped crying for the Warriors because they are a team that will always break your heart.

CAMEROON got their World Cup show underway yesterday and no nation provides us with a painful reminder, of what might have been for our Warriors when it comes to this global showcase, than the Indomitable Lions.

In the shadow of our worst World Cup campaign in history, the convenient way to confront our collective failings in the doomed adventure to try and qualify for Brazil has been to retreat into a shell and tell each other that, after all, we are not good enough.

Bloggers, from the innocent ones just providing another dimension to the crisis to the hired guns, writing under pseudonyms and singing their Masters’ Voices in articles meant to camouflage the failings of the zifa leaders, have gone into overdrive to tell us that we are just a pathetic football nation.

The statistics have been excavated from the archives, to help drive home the point, and readers of the mainstream newspapers and the growing social media platforms have been inundated with reports that paint a grim picture of us being a hopeless football nation.

We have been told, repeatedly, that we have just qualified for two Nations Cup finals in 17 attempts, admittedly a poor record, and that alone should tell us that we are, indeed, a hopeless flyweight boxer trying to flex his little muscles in a heavyweight jungle where the likes are Muhammad Ali, Smoking Joe Frazier and George Foreman are the opponents.

What they will not tell you is the part that our successive football leaders have played, in more ways than one, to destroy the dreams of our footballers either by hiring the worst coaches that this earth will ever provide, in terms of expatriate personnel, or ensuring that the likes of Moses Chunga and company were frustrated, from day one in camp, by being paid peanuts.

Leadership matters and you only have to look at what is happening across the Zambezi, since some people there saw the wisdom of entrusting the leadership of their national game into the hands of a man whose life is all about football, and the remarkable transformation they have undergone under his guidance, to understand what I mean.

Ten years ago, when we made our debut at the Nations Cup, the Zambians weren’t good enough to qualify for Tunisia, having come second to Benin in a group whose other member was Tanzania, remember them, who were so hopeless back then they lost all their SIX qualifying matches.

Then Kalusha arrived in 2008, to take over as FAZ president, and in his first term he made them champions of Africa, took the women’s Under-15 national team to the World Cup and transformed She-polopolo from a punching bag, of the Mighty Warriors, into a side strong enough to eliminate our team in a duel for a place at the African Women Championships.

You got to love Kalusha, he might have got US$50 000 from Mohamed Bin Hammam in a shadowy transaction which The Sunday Times of Britain tells us had a stench of corruption linked to the 2022 Qatar World Cup madness, but he is a leader, even in his hour of turmoil when his integrity is being questioned, that you can forgive.

There he was in Miami last week, training with his Zambian players as if he was a player himself, going through their drills and making them feel that they were together in this adventure, as Chipolopolo prepared to take on Japan in a World Cup warm-up match.

The spin doctors will tell you that we are useless, as a football nation, because we have never qualified for the World Cup, something that the Zambians haven’t done and it has taken the country that Edin Dzeko plays for this long to make their maiden appearance while the country that Ryan Giggs and Gareth Bale represent has only been there once, way back in 1958.

They will tell you, as they have been doing in the past two weeks, that our players are the worst possible footballers that one can ever get to be their sporting ambassadors, lacking in quality, lacking in ambition, lacking in loyalty they even stage a strike on the eve of the match.

But they won’t tell you that those boys who excelled at CHAN feel betrayed by a system that agreed, and signed a deal with them, to pay them half the proceeds from that tournament only to change goal posts, once the money had been deposited into the zifa account, and give them peanuts.

The Harambee Stars of Kenya have never been to the World Cup, and have failed to return to the Nations Cup finals since 2004, but they will be in Brazil watching the World Cup as part of a team bonding session with their government hoping that by seeing others playing at such a showcase, their men can also find the inspiration to scale those heights.

So, you can see the investment that is being done in the Harambee Stars, a nation sending its national team to Brazil, even if it didn’t qualify, so that they don’t only learn but they also get the inspiration to play at such tournaments in future and the best that we can do is to get represented there by our football leadership.

Yes, we are not as good as the Spaniards and we have never claimed that we are the best football nation on the continent but we are not as bad as we what we have turned ourselves into, in this march in the darkness, where we can even crash out of the Nations Cup qualifiers, at the first hurdle of the preliminaries, long before the real battles have begun.

When The Warriors Were Brave Hunters
If you listen to the spin doctors you will get a feeling that we have never had football, worth talking about, in this country because, after all, we are that nation that only qualified for the Nations Cup twice, in their history, and we have never been to the World Cup.

You will agree with them that there is a certain degree of foolishness, among those who cry loudest whenever we stumble in a Nations Cup campaign, because they will tell you that those blessed with wisdom have long stopped crying for the Warriors because they are a team that will always break your heart.

Reinhard Fabisch, may God eternally bless his soul, would certainly argue otherwise, if he was alive today, questioning this myth that we are a hopeless football nation that sends hopeless footballers into battle now and again while, all  time expecting rich pickings and the scripting of unrealistic success stories, from their adventure.

He might have failed to get us to the World Cup in the United States in 1994 but he helped us, for the first time, get a true appreciation of who we were, as a football nation, and what our footballers can deliver, when provided with the right guidance, and the incredible lofty heights they can scale, under the right leadership.

Some people naively say that Fabisch was a failure of grand proportions because, in their wisdom, they say he came at a time when we had the best of our players, the so-called Golden Generation, and he still failed to qualify for the Nations Cup and the World Cup and failure is just that, failure, whether one fails at the first or last hurdle is irrelevant.

But who says Golden Generations are always meant to deliver?
If that was the case then Didier Drogba and his group would have been serial champions of Africa but, as they come towards the twilight of their international adventure, with the Brazil World Cup representing the swansong tournament for this group, they don’t even have one Nations Cup title in the cabinet.

Collin Matiza and Charles Mabika will argue that we even sent stronger national teams, than the Dream Team, into the Nations Cup battles in the ‘80s when Stanley “Sinyo” Ndunduma was the men who kept providing the leading light in a collection of battle-hardened and talented Warriors, but we didn’t qualify.

Fabisch helped us understand our true value as a football nation, helped us appreciate what we could do as a football nation, the giants that we could bring down, guided us to respect our true status as a football community, and rather than restrict ourselves to be the men who were only good enough, to win Cecafa and Cosafa, we needed to look at the bigger picture and know that we could even qualify for the World Cup.

Others will say that we punched above our weight, during that golden period, but that is a quality in itself, something that Fabisch activated in us, which had been dormant all along but which was now our strength and, boy oh boy, we used it well as we underwent a rapid transformation from just another football nation on the continent to the Dream Team.

On the 20th anniversary of the ’94 World Cup, the one World Cup that will always provide a reminder of the lofty heights we can scale in this game when we have everything in place, from the right football leadership to the right coach, the man who was zifa president then, Trevor Carelse-Juul, returned from the wilderness and asked us to give him another chance to complete his mission.

Of course, we rejected him, the way we rejected Norman Mapeza, a key member of the Dream Team that dazzled under Trevor’s watch.
But statistics don’t lie.

Twenty years ago, when Cameroon played their first game at the ’94 World Cup, it evoked memories of what would have been for us, how we had come very close to be in their position, how it could all have been different if Guinea hadn’t lost to them at home and, even in heaven, Fabisch will testify that the match officials in that winner-take-all in Yaounde, had a hand to play in the Indomitable Lions’ victory.

In his rage of anger, at the end of that ill-tempered showdown, Fabisch threw some United States dollar notes at the match officials, suggesting that they had traded their soul to ensure a Cameroon triumph, something that earned him a one-year ban from coaching from caf.

As he watches us from the purity of heaven, far away from the dirty football world that we live in, Fabisch might be starting to understand the shadowy politics which ensured that the fixtures were always made in such a way that the biggest game of them all, THE WINNER-TAKE-ALL SHOWDOWN, would be played in Yaounde and not Harare.

But while the ugly politics of football might have robbed us of our Finest Hour, with a place in the United States there for the taking, they will never take away what Fabisch gave us — the ability to appreciate our true powers as a football nation, the courage to take on the great nations of this continent and beat them at their game and an indomitable spirit that made us believe we were great.

Cameroon, who needed some dubious officiating to beat us for a place in the United States in ’94, are back at the World Cup, 20 years later, but we never roared, as Warriors, in this campaign, failing to win even a single game in our qualifiers for the first time in history, and finishing bottom of our group.

While the Indomitable Lions have retained their status as a powerful football force on the continent, we have suffered a considerable decline, in terms of our strength as a power even though this has come, interestingly, during the period when we have qualified for two Nations Cup finals.

But it’s those moments — stretching Cameroon to the limit in ‘93, beating Algeria in Tunisia in 2004 and beating a World Cup-bound Ghana in Egypt, just months before they beat the United States 2-1 and Czech Republic 2-0 in Germany to advance to the second round in Germany — which convince me that we are not a useless football nation as many would like us to believe.

Yes, we have lost our way a bit in international football and the results of the last World Cup and Nations Cup qualifiers paint the picture of a very sick Warrior, battling infections coming from all directions, but I don’t think what has happened of late is a true reflection of what we are as a football nation.

We are victims of the pounding that our national game has received, at all levels with virtually nothing, in terms of things that are supposed to be done to help the team, being done and even when the coach asked for a simple postponement of a weekend’s programme of league fixtures, to help his team in preparations, we said NO because in our small world we even believed the domestic Premiership is bigger than the national team.

The Three Logs That Tell Our Story
Fifa 1994 World Cup Qualifiers Africa Group C

Results
Togo 0, ZIMBABWE 1 (Adam Ndlovu); ZIMBABWE 2 (Peter Ndlovu, Agent Sawu), Egypt 1; Angola 1, ZIMBABWE 1 (Sawu); ZIMBABWE 2 (Sawu, Henry McKop), Togo 1; ZIMBABWE 2 (Sawu, Peter), Angola 1; Egypt 2, ZIMBABWE 1 (Peter) *Result Nullified); Egypt 0, ZIMBABWE 0 (replay, neutral venue)
P    W    D    L    F    A    Pts
ZIMBABWE     6    4    2    0    8    4    10
Egypt              6    3    2    1    9    3    8
Angola            5    1    2    1    3    4    4
Togo                 5    0    0    5    2    11    0

*Two points for a win. ZIMBABWE qualify for FINAL round of ’94 World Cup qualifiers
Final Qualifier Group C

Results
Guinea 3, ZIMBABWE 0; Cameroon 3, Guinea 1; ZIMBABWE 1 (Sawu), Cameroon 0; Guinea 0, Cameroon 1; ZIMBABWE 1 (Sawu), Guinea 0; Cameroon 3, ZIMBABWE 1 (Adam)
P    W    D    L    F    A    Pts
Cameroon       4    3    0    1    7    3    6
ZIMBABWE     4    2    0    2    3    6    4
Guinea            4    1    0    3    4    5    2
*Cameroon qualify for ’94 World Cup

2014 Fifa World Cup Qualifiers Africa Group G

Results
ZIMBABWE 0, Guinea 1; Mozambique 0, ZIMBABWE 0; Egypt 2, Zimbabwe 1 (Musona); ZIMBABWE 2 (Musona, Zvasiya), Egypt 4; Guinea 1, ZIMBABWE 0; ZIMBABWE 1, Mozambique 1
P    W    D    L    F    A    Pts
Egypt                 6    6    0    0    16    7    18
Guinea              6    3    1    2    12    8    10
Mozambique     6    0    3    3    2    10    3
ZIMBABWE        6    0    2    4    4    9    2

Remembering A Gunslinger We Trusted
Agent Sawu now works as a coach at Division One side Ntabazinduna and, when I last checked, they were top of the table in their pursuit for the sole ticket into the Premiership next season.

Back in the days when our Warriors were brave hunters Sawu used to be the spearhead of the Dream Team attack and scored six goals in 10 matches in our quest for a place at the ’94 World Cup finals.

When some people tell me that we are just a hopeless football nation, who shouldn’t cry out loudly when we finish without a win in the World Cup qualifiers and lose in the preliminary round of the Nations Cup qualifiers, it’s people like Sawu who provide the comfort for me that we aren’t such terrible minnows.

It’s people like Sawu, and what I saw them doing in the past when the weight of a capacity crowd at the National Sports Stadium rested easily on his shoulders and he would, with an air of inevitability, deliver just when it mattered most, who provide the hope that tomorrow might not be as bleak as some people fear.

Back in the days we used to have a system, in our football, that produced not only Sawu but Peter Ndlovu, his strike partner in that Dream Team, the late Adam Ndlovu, the late Benjamin Nkonjera, you name them.

It’s that system that we have destroyed because our football leaders forgot the value of people like Ali “Baba” Dube, the celebrated juniors coach who worked wonders in Bulawayo, the value of people like Albert “Dalala” Mabika, we frustrated them and made them feel so unwanted a lot of them just gave up.

We encouraged a system where our Premiership and Division One teams abandoned the junior structures and it became so fashionable, all hidden under the guise of cost-cutting measures, no one raised any alarm when we didn’t see any players rising from the junior ranks of our so-called Big Three Teams, in the past few years.

Our football leaders spoke about development, only when the television cameras were running, and it ended the moment the guys from ZBC switched off those cameras because no one would ask questions from that point and no one would hold them to account.

The South Africans, since Danny Jordaan came on board, have gone back to the basics and invested into an ambitious programme to re-activate the structures that used to produce the likes of Doctor Khumalo and we have seen a number of youth tournaments being held throughout that country.

Meanwhile, even against the damning report card of our worst World Cup and Nations Cup campaign in history, no one is pressing the alarm switch and Sports Minister Andrew Langa’s response has been to call an all-stakeholders’ indaba to discuss this crisis.

In August 2012, his predecessor, David Coltart, also attended an all-stakeholders’ indaba on football where zifa briefed the Minister the state of football in the country in general and it was the same story, lack of funds, lack of government support, lack of this and lack of that.

Two years later, nothing changed and we find ourselves facing another all-stakeholders indaba and zifa will again brief the Minister on the state of football in the country and it’s likely to be the same story, lack of funds, lack of government support, lack of this and that.
In the meantime, no one cares about reviving the structures that gave us Agent Sawu and Peter Ndlovu, even though this doesn’t cost a fortune, and all we do is telling each other, and finding a lot of comfort in those words, that we have always been a hopeless football nation.

Come on guys, that’s not true, inini ndaramba hangu.

To God Be The Glory!

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

Chicharitoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

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