The ManicaPost
ESTEEMED followers of the game of football, thank you for finding time for interaction.
Exactly three weeks, that is about only 21 days, are left before the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations tournament kicks off in Gabon and yet Zimbabwe’s senior men football team are yet to begin their preparations in earnest.
This has become an almost typical tale with virtually all national teams we send into international football competitions and there has also been a familiar end to the inevitability of the bitter results we always suffer – crashing out at the first hurdle.
This apparent lack of adequate preparations has always been a huge drawback that dwindles our edge of competitiveness at major tournaments.
While it has looked like a good year for Zimbabwe’s national football teams in terms of qualification, it has, however, not been as fruitful on the pitch owing, chiefly, to being ill-prepared for participation at the tournaments and we continue to moan and mourn over this each time we fall short but never appear to address this flaw so as to redress it.
It is sad to note that at all the major competitions we contested this year, Zimbabwe never made it past the group stages as we always suffered early elimination at the first time of asking.
At Chan in January, the Warriors finished bottom of the pile in Rwanda, with a single point from three matches below lightweights Uganda (two), Mali (five) and Zambia (seven); as they also failed to progress to the next round in the Cosafa Cup hosted by Namibia in June, for the second year running, after being pipped into second (tied with Madagascar) by group winners Swaziland.
The Mighty Warriors at the Olympics Games of August in Rio de Janeiro were also tail-enders behind Australia (four), Germany (four) and Canada (nine) in their Group F and, again, came last at the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon last month without picking up a single point; while the Young Warriors suffered a similar fate by finishing bottom of their just-ended Cosafa Under-20 group.
The question then becomes that what is it that we have been learning from the mistakes we made and serious shortcomings we faced during preparing for all those tournaments this year and how is it helping us improve our present circumstance?
Or what investment are we putting into the team in terms of preparations as other serious nations would go into camp well in time before the tournament to fine tune; because our input into those preps are usually reflected in the results?
How then is a coach expected to come up with his best game plan when players only troop into camp just a few days before leaving for the games? Have we not had instances when some players or their clubs claim to have received invites or national team call-ups very late to fly out of their base; and in worst cases the invites being said to have never reached some of the players the coach had requested to have and included in his plans? Does this not leave the coach hamstrung since he needs time to work on assessing and trying out combinations of different players because they will be coming from different teams, used to playing different styles?
What is it exactly that we got to do in the intervening period between our qualification and participation at the tournament? Remember, Dear Reader, that Zimbabwe were confirmed qualified for 2017 Afcon after beating Malawi in June and the dead-rubber Guinea tie in September, exactly three months down the line, almost cost us disqualification as we sought postponement of the match owing to our chaotic travel arrangements!
This has repeatedly seen us falling terribly short of the requirement to acclimatise as we always touch down treasonously late for these tournaments to disastrous consequences.
But is failing to plan not planning to fail?
Our reluctance to properly plan and adequately prepare has been a sure recipe of a cocktail of repeated and continued failure.
If we need to last the distance, then we have to be found to be doing more as we are not going there just to make up numbers but to take part as competitive participants. We surely need to up our game on the preparations front. Yes, we might have already secured corporate sponsorship for the team’s excursion in Gabon, but a lot still needs to be done in terms of having the players being physically and mentally prepared as well as conditioned logistically through several international friendly matches and sufficient time in camp in order to allow the squad to bond well.
As Gabon approaches, we absolutely need to show progress, improvement and development from previous competitions of this year because as a nation we cannot continue as a “been-to” of these tournaments.
There are no shortcuts to success as this involves hardworking commitment and we have to go through the basics sometimes, failure of which would be asking for serious trouble.
Triumphant Zambia Under-20 coach Beston Chambeshi, who recently led his charges to regional glory, hailed the amount of pre-tournament groundwork they put into their preparations for the Cosafa youth championship, which preps dated as far back as August, including a practice match with Supersport’s Under-20 side when they arrived for the tourney in South Africa.
Time and tide wait for no man and the clock continues to tick as we countdown to Gabon.
It’s Game On, Play On!
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