ZIFA is clearly driving in reverse gear

ONE thing that the late former men’s senior national football team coach, Reinhard Fabisch (may his dear soul rest in peace), succeeded in doing during his time between 1992 and 1995 was to teach the nation how to dream and believe.

Through his sheer passion for the game, he assembled an extraordinary team that aptly came to be known as the Dream Team.

He left us with many memories to savour, including many heartaches, too.

Who can possibly forget that cliffhanger of a match at the National Sports Stadium on July 25, 1993, when the Warriors needed to win against Zambia to achieve the historic milestone of qualifying for their first-ever Nations Cup in Tunisia.

In a script probably written by the gods of satire, Zambian talisman Kalusha Bwalya rose in the 80th minute to head home the equaliser that silenced the expectant 60 000 Zimbabweans that had turned up hoping to watch history in motion.

It was not to be.

That Zambian side were no pushovers, as they progressed to the final of the Nations Cup, where they lost to eventual winners Nigeria.

You could hear a pin drop at the giant stadium after that header, which knocked the stuffing out of the Warriors.

Again, when it came to Fabisch, the football gods seemed to have a crude sense of humour, for he was to agonisingly fail in similar fashion when the team needed to beat Cameroon to make it to the 1994 FIFA World Cup.

For all the euphoria and goodwill, Fabisch failed to qualify for any major tournament.

Only after exorcising their obsession with foreign coaches did the Warriors begin to make significant headway and achieved the seemingly impossible.

Sunday Chidzambwa — probably Zimbabwe’s best coach of all time — took Zimbabwe to the African Cup of Nations twice, with Kalisto Pasuwa and Charles Mhlauri being the other coaches to qualify for the same tournament.

Chidzambwa’s pedigree can never be doubted, as he remains the only coach to take a local football team, Dynamos, to the CAF Champions League final.

The moral of the story is: Local coaches are equally competent to take Zimbabwe to the promised land.

This is the lesson that we should have learnt from the fairytale developments at this year’s AFCON finals, where a 40-year-old Emerse Faé, who fortuitously took the reins when Frenchman Jean-Louis Gasset was sacked mid-tournament, went on to win the tournament.

It was the same at Ngezi, where Takesure Chiragwi succeeded where foreign coaches had failed. But ZIFA’s Normalisation Committee chairperson Lincoln Mutasa and his posse seem to think otherwise.

After sifting through what we were told were hundreds of CVs, they have since shortlisted five foreigners for the job — Spaniard Gerard Nus, veteran German Winfried Schäfer and his countrymen Michael Nees and Antoine Hey, as well as Brazilian Marcio Maximo Barcellos.

They say an announcement of the new coach is now imminent.

Some of the shortlisted candidates, like Schäfer, who won the Africa Cup of Nations title with Cameroon in 2002, come with seemingly impressive CVs, but Bra Shakes does not believe they will perform any miracles with the Warriors, what with ZIFA having already wrecked their chances of qualifying for either AFCON or the World Cup.

Bra Shakes would like to be proved wrong.

And the mystery of why the Brazilian gaffer Baltemar Brito was jettisoned after impressive outings against Rwanda and Nigeria, including a largely satisfactory stint at Highlanders, will forever boggle the mind.

But ZIFA being ZIFA, this is to be expected.

And the propensity to pay fabulous salaries to foreign coaches while conversely being stingy when paying our own tells us all we have to know about the warped mentality and grossly misplaced priorities of the men and women who run our football.

We have no option but to suffer Mutasa’s reign over the next nine months, but we have to prepare for a long, bumpy ride as ZIFA is clearly driving in reverse gear.

God help us!

Until next time.

Peace!

Yours Sincerely,

Bra Shakes.