The Sunday Mail
Makomborero Mutimukulu – Acting Sports Editor
CAPS UNITED midfielder Tendai Samanja is caught between his heart and tummy.
A rock and a hard place.
His contract with the team he grew up adoring, the team he loves playing for and the only team he reckons is worth mentioning in local football lapses at the end of the season.
Samanja’s green heart is telling him to stay despite Makepekepe’s well-documented financial crunches, while his tummy, and basic survival instincts, point to a future lying elsewhere.
At 28, the midfielder appreciates that he is at a delicate stage in his career.
One good move can leave him set for life.
The opposite is true.
“Caps United is the team for me; I love the club and would love to stay, but there are so many issues to consider as well,” said the man who knew pretty early on in life that football, and not school as claimed by his grandmother, offered him the best chance to turn sweat into sweet.
The game hasn’t really taken him from poverty to a porsche life as yet.
captaining Chipadze High School to a glory back in 1999
However, for a man who lost his mother when he was in Grade 3, watched his father turn his back on him when he needed him the most and grew accustomed to going to bed on an empty stomach, the Caps United midfielder is grateful.
“I had a very tough childhood,” discloses Samanja.
“My mother died when I was just eight; my dad literally vanished from my life and I had to stay with my grandmother, who tried her best to take care of me, but everyday was a nightmare.
“Under such difficult conditions, my grandma would always say ‘Tendai ukadzidza unogara zvakanaka’ (If you get schooled, you will have a good life). However, I wasn’t a bright student; so, I knew that Gogo’s idea would never work.
“I was always convinced that football was the career for me and as I look back now I can only thank God for his blessings. Look, my life is not all that rosy, but considering where I came from, this is it man; I cannot complain since it can only get better.”
Convincing his grandma that football was a career worth pursuing was a Herculean task.
It needed a miracle.
It came.
After years of football-triggered run-ins Samanja’s grandmother finally awakened to the idea that football could transform their lives when Bindura United offered to take care of all her grandson’s school needs when he was in Form 2.
Just as she was warming up to the idea of having the school fees burden lifted off her overloaded, ageing shoulders, things got even better, as Samanja reveals.
“One weekend, my brother invited me to a social soccer tournament that was sponsored by Solomon Mugavazi, who owned Monomotapa United. At that competition, I scored three goals, was voted player of the tournament and received 500 Zimbabwean dollars.
“After the games Mugavazi, together with Monoz youth coach George Jojo, came to me and offered to transfer me from Chipadze High School in Bindura to Vainona in Harare . . . there was no way I could say no.
“When I told my grandma that I was moving to Harare and a football team would be taking care of me, she cried. That was one of the most touching moments of my life,” he said.
While he had it all mapped out in his head, which wasn’t dreadlocked by then, Samanja never imagined buttering his bread through being asked to be an enemy of football artistry in the middle of the park.
Samanja always viewed himself as a play-maker, hence he nicknamed himself Okocha and was obsessed with wearing the jersey number 10.
However, at Monomotapa, after a couple of years of playing just about everywhere, he was cloned from being a player who saw himself as a midfield orchestra into a hard-tackling midfielder whose job was to mop up the mess caused by those who always seek to massage the ball each time they are in possession of it.
Samanja was also tasked with tenaciously snapping at the heels of the opposition’s play-makers with the ruthlessness of a hired sniper.
It wasn’t easy.
Norman Mapeza masterminded the “painful” transformation.
“At first, I used to think Norman hated me,” reveals Samanja.
“That was because he would make me stay behind for extra training and we worked on such things as tackling, long range shots and cross field passes.
“After a couple of weeks of such training, he played me as a defensive midfielder along with Mthulisi Maphosa and in that season (2008) we won the league.
“Mapeza transformed my attitude as a player and I rate him highly together with my current coach (Taurai Mangwiro).”
After 11 years at Monoz the midfielder left for Caps United during the 2011 mid-season transfer window in a $15 000 deal.
The deep pockets of Farai Jere oiled the transaction.
Life at Makepekepe, the team he decided to tattoo on his heart just to spite close family members who believe God made the sky blue because of Dynamos, has been topsy-turvy.
There have been days of plenty.
They have been days of starvation.
This year bad days have outnumbered good ones.
Samanja counts it all with joy.
Now, as the season heads for an orgasm, with Caps United still in with a chance to sneak onto the championship podium, the midfield grafter is daring to believe.
“Coach Tau says our aim is to finish among the top four, but this is football and anything can happen. We just have to win all our remaining five games and see how it goes,” he said.
