THE Zimbabwe national football team — the Warriors — were at Barbourfields Stadium on Sunday, the first time they have been in Bulawayo after an absence of three years and, given that this is a national team and we are now in the off-season, one would have expected a very good attendance.
Innocent Kurwa
The attendance at Barbourfields was very bad indeed and it does not need one to be a financial wizard to work out that the Zimbabwe Football Association (Zifa) certainly made a huge loss on Sunday and it was not surprising when Zifa deputy president Ndumiso Gumede said he was very disappointed by the size of the crowd.
“At Rufaro Stadium we would be talking of a full stadium. We bring the team down to Bulawayo and you get this poor attendance. It works against playing national team matches in Bulawayo,” he said at Barbourfields, just before the match started. This observation is very true.
Some like me hardly go to Barbourfields for club matches during the season, but when the national team is playing it deserves the active support of all Bulawayo people in particular and of all other Zimbabweans in general.
This active support can only be through going to Barbourfields and actually paying to watch the team playing. In this respect, a big thank you should be and is extended to all those who paid to watch the match on Sunday.
Apart from helping in meeting the expenses associated with having the national team in camp, good attendances also bring a few other advantages.
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One of these is that a full stadium engenders a more competitive atmosphere for the teams playing — an empty stadium gives the players a mood of a practice match in the true sense of the word. Another benefit is that a big crowd gives the home team a lot of gusto — it is like an energy drink of some sort.
Yes, both the Soweto and Mpilo ends, albeit in different ways, did their best in uplifting the atmosphere on Sunday, but a bigger crowd would have done a far greater job of it!
It is understandable, therefore, that national coach Ian Gorowa was disappointed by the low level of support he witnessed on Sunday. In his remarks after the match Gorowa did not hide his disgust when he said he had expected a lot more people at Barbourfields than the number that turned up.
“After what we sacrificed to bring the national team here we thought a higher number of people would attend the match,” he said. Indeed, we all expected a high turn-out!
We are told that the national team will remain at Barbourfields until the artificial turf at Rufaro Stadium has been refurbished, but we must support this initiative by giving up a bit of our time and money and attending the national team matches at Barbourfields so that the Zifa decision to switch to Bulawayo becomes financially viable.
Also, the powers that be must make it more exciting to be at Barbourfields for the national team.
On Sunday quite a few simple things would have made the afternoon a little bit more fulfilling. For example, the address system should have been used more effectively to communicate with the public at the time of national anthems – by simply announcing that we need to stand up for the national anthems and the order the anthems were being sung.
There is this apparently ever present assumption that every one at the stadium knows what is going on — it is a wrong assumption. When the two teams on the pitch observed a minute’s silence in honour of the late icon of Africa, Nelson Mandela, some of the public did not know what was going on and announcing this would have motivated all those in the stadium to also participate in observing the minute’s silence.
As it is, some people did not stand up for that minute although they certainly would have if they had known what was going on.
During the match a lot of us wanted to know who was who in the team — it is not every match goer that knows all the players in the national team, including the substitutes!
There were quite a few of us asking around who was who in the national team, especially given that the players were putting on kit with numbers only.
The public address system should have been used at the beginning of the match to announce the names of the players in the starting eleven and, thereafter, of substitutions whenever these were made. This would have given all those in the stadium a more meaningful participation indeed.
It was in fact, a little of a nuisance that there was some muffled sort of music playing over the public address system with some croaky voices in the background at one stage in the second half of the international friendly. This simply hurt the ears!
l Far far away from Barbourfields and in a different sporting discipline, England is suffering in the Ashes series in Australia with the hosts winning the first two Tests of the five — Test series emphatically — winning the first Test in Brisbane by 381 runs and the second, that ended yesterday in Adelaide by 218 runs to take a formidable 2-0 lead.
The third Test will start in Perth on Friday, but it is the manner of Australia’s domination that has shocked England and their hordes of supporters!
