The Sunday Mail
So the Zimbabwe senior soccer team, the Warriors, hogged the limelight for the wrong reasons last week by surrendering their dominance of the COSAFA Cup, a regional tournament they ruled by winning a record six titles since 2000.
In the 2021 edition, the Warriors were a pale shadow of the side that held the entire Southern African region spellbound with back-to-back wins in 2017 and 2018 when they swept to their fifth and sixth titles.
On Wednesday, they ended their dance in the competition with a 2-1 defeat to a young Senegal side whose oldest player was 28-year-old skipper and goalkeeper Pape Ndiaye.
By finishing the tournament with just two draws and as many defeats, the Warriors took a giant step backwards, and the signs of regression that first emerged at the African Nations Championships (CHAN) in Cameroon resurfaced.
In fact, they have been on a sensational slide since the arrival of Croatian coach Zdravko Logarusic, who has managed just one win in 12 international assignments.
Because the Warriors are the country’s flagship sporting team, it means everything that happens to them and about them is bound to grab attention.
And understandably, their poor 2021 COSAFA Cup campaign in which they surrendered a proud 17-match unbeaten run has been cause for anger, embarrassment and debate.
Naturally, the buck stops with the coach, Logarusic, who has failed to add the kind of value one would expect from an expatriate.
He failed to justify why ZIFA would splash scarce resources on him ahead of a local coach.
In the two tournaments that Logarusic has presided over as Warriors coach — the CHAN tournament and the ongoing COSAFA Cup — the 55-year-old gaffer has simply looked clueless and his constant experiments with players who are selected on questionable criteria has not helped matters.
It is our contention, however, that Logarusic alone should not shoulder the blame for the mess that our beloved Warriors find themselves in.
While he is responsible for the team’s results, the nation should not look beyond the ZIFA board, which has a penchant for blundering.
Of course, they must take the flak for the substandard performance by all national teams.
There should be checks and balances through an evaluation and appraisal system on how the national coach is performing.
If what we saw at the COSAFA Cup were not tell-tale signs that Logarusic is not the sort of man who can be trusted with the Warriors 2022 World Cup qualification campaign, then Lord help us.
It is not good enough for ZIFA to use the coronavirus to justify the poor performances.
Just like with any sporting association, ZIFA can only be judged on the success of its national teams.
It follows, therefore, that the performance of the national team is a true reflection of how Felton Kamambo’s board is faring.
Lack of the soccer mother body’s transparency over the use of FIFA funds for talent identification and development, including controversies over Covid-19 relief funds, is quite instructive.
It is so bad that the women’s team, the Mighty Warriors, who made a fairy-tale appearance at the Rio Olympics five years ago, were not even in the reckoning for the upcoming Tokyo Games.
They bowed out in shambolic fashion when they boycotted their Olympic qualifier against Zambia at home after ZIFA failed to pay them.
And that we have a Warriors coach who is two years into his job, but still claims he is not familiar with local players despite having three local assistants and a technical director is simply unacceptable.
The Croat cannot be chopping and changing the national team all the time in the name of searching for new players.
Senegal, for example, went to the COSAFA Cup with a clear objective to develop young talent and took a developmental team of mainly teenagers.
In contrast, Zimbabwe took with them the quartet of Washington Arubi (36), Ovidy Karuru (32), Jimmy Dzingai and Qadr Amini (both 31), and 24-year-old Nyasha Dube, who is playing in some obscure fifth-tier league in the United States.
If COSAFA was really about development for ZIFA, then the national Under-23 coach Tonderai Ndiraya and his Young Warriors would have been the team that travelled to Port Elizabeth.
Unless something is done, and done urgently to stop the current slide, then the country should not even dare to dream of a chance of making it to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
At least not under Logarusic!
