Go Warriors!

Editorial Comment
Welcome to the new year 2014! This Sunday the Zimbabwe national soccer team, the Warriors, will play their opening group match of Chan finals

SEASON’S greetings, welcome to the new year 2014! This Sunday the Zimbabwe national soccer team, the Warriors, will play their opening group match of the African Nations Champinships (Chan) continental tournament finals that kick off in South Africa in January 11.

Zimbabwe are in Group B together with North African powerhouse Morocco, West Africans Burkina Faso and East Africans Uganda. The Warriors play their opening group match against Morocco in Cape Town at 5pm. While Morocco are a traditional powerhouse, Burkina Faso, to me, are the biggest threat in the Warriors’ group.

Burkina Faso reached the final qualifying round for the World Cup in which they narrowly lost to Algeria. In other words, Burkina Faso have a very strong squad at the Chan finals given that only players playing in a country’s domestic league can be fielded.

National coach Ian Gorowa has been working with the Warriors squad for a reasonable time and has named what is on paper a strong and possiby the best of what is available on the domestic scene. This is the third time Zimbabwe are at the Chan finals and let us hope it will be third time lucky for the Warriors and they bring home the title.

All we can now say is best of luck and may 2014 open on a very successful note, at least for the Warriors and all football lovers. Success would brighten what otherwise looks like a bleak year economically.

Ahead of their departure, the Warriors recently had a chance to engage the Sport minister Andrew Langa who promised that he would ensure that his ministry came up with some $80 000 for the players’ bonuses. This is welcome news but let us hope, and trust, that the ministry will be able to deliver on this promise.

If it did, this would remove all financial concerns the players may have, especially the non-payment of bonuses, and such a serene atmosphere should help spur the Warriors on.

  • Zimbabwe Cricket (ZC) has named a 30-member squad to start preparing for the ICC Twenty20 World Cup which will played in Bangladesh in March and April. The squad will be trimmed to the final 15 next month. With a new year starting and 2013 now past, it is fervently hoped that the financial problems that created havoc in cricket went away with 2013.

Quite a number of times national team players have boycotted practice and the domestic league was disrupted as players pushed for payment of their outstanding salaries.

Of course the woes that ZC finds itself in are a true reflection of the economic problems the country is facing at a macro level and it is this economic meltdown that has seen sponsorship drying up for all sporting disciplines — cricket and football included.

 

  • NetOne Challenge back
  • Eusebio dies

 

Back to football — the NetOne annual season opener is apparently back and four teams, Dynamos and Highlanders among them, will tussle for the winners’ medals. The last time we had this tournament what took the limelight was the controversy over what the players were putting on rather than what they could do on the field of play.

There is something a bit puzzling about local sponsors, particularly their insistence on exclusivity. Surely there is nothing lost from a tournament when teams play in their usual uniform sporting the insignia of their usual sponsors — it is commonplace elsewhere all over the world.

Liverpool dorn Standard Chartered stripes while competing in the Barclays Premier League yet the two British banks compete head-to-head, especially in merging markets. We have never heard of Barclays threatening to withdraw their sponsorship because Liverpool played in the shirts marked with insignia of a competitor.

If that was in Zimbabwe tantrums would have been flying all over the show.

Let us pray that when the NetOne tournament kicks off we will be spared the charade of uniforms being the centre of attraction.

  •  The world of football on Sunday lost one of its legends — the African who played at the 1966 World Cup finals in which his team, Portugal, came third.

Eusebio

The man is Eusebio and today he is generally regarded as one of Portugal’s greatest soccer players. It is worth mentioning, however, and in bold letters, that Eusebio was a Mozambican born Eusebio da Silva Ferreira in Maputo, then Lourenco Marques, in 1942, and joined Benfica in 1960 as a striker. He qualified for the Portugal national team simply because Mozambique was a Portuguese colony.

eusebio-portugal-2066609

It would be wonderful if his remains were interred in his proper motherland Mozambique. He is a son of the soil, so to speak.