The Sunday Mail
Makomborero Mutimukulu Sports Editor
FOR decades Dynamos have been playing Russian roulette with their existence, making a mockery of football administration tenets.
Their drunken master boardroom antics seemed not to affect how the team performed on the pitch.
And when Kallisto Pasuwa won four league titles on the bounce between 2011 and 2014, the old men accused of running down the one time Glamour Boys downed fine whiskey at Raylton Sports Club in Harare, patting each other on the back and further leading the football powerhouse down a dark alley.
In their drunken stupor they failed to realise that they were choking the life out of this once great club.
How can they say we are failing to run the club when we are winning the title? That was the question they asked rhetorically before guffawing most heartily.
As they celebrated unprecedented championship success, the Dynamos board continued to step on toes, using and firing coaches and administrators with reckless abandon.
The list of former players owed money by the club grew with each passing day while board chair Bernard Marriot strengthened his stranglehold on the club.
Concerned fans were told to stay in “their” lane and desist from questioning how the club was run.
That cut the umbilical cord that for years saw Dynamos sharing the same blood with its mythical seven million fans.
But you all know what they say about Karma, she is not the most virtuous of women and always comes to collect her dues.
Her books of accounts must be settled with a pound of flesh. Or more.
Lady Karma has chosen this season to remind DeMbare just who she is and how much they owe her.
After years of turning right while indicating left, years of financial misappropriation, years of taking fans for granted, the club finds itself gasping for Premiership breath.
The fans who used to cry when DeMbare lost in years gone by cannot care less, some even wish that the team gets relegated so that “Marriot can see some sense”.
So as DeMbare fight relegation, the fans who should be giving them wings are not bothering turning up for matches.
Yet this is a club that finished second last season!
How does a team fall from near grace to grass inside a year? Karma, Karma, Karma! Marriot was warned by the likes of Farai Munetsi – the fine administrator who died in Harare last week — that Dynamos could not afford to carry on with business in such a slovenly way.
But with Marriot being Marriot, those who dared to point out DeMbare’s flaws were sent packing. Now the club looks like it’s dying without the loving arms of many fans to at least ease the pain.
Marriot himself is conspicuous by his absence at the club’s matches.
DeMbare may need the football equivalent of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), “a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in patients to provide relief from mental disorders”.
Truth is it is hard to imagine a top flight league without Dynamos. But their relegation maybe the shock treatment, the ECT, they need to get back to their senses.
Karma has come calling, and the season may just end with blue blood on the floor.
