We’ve ourselves to blame for Afcon failure

NOW that all the dust is beginning to settle, we can soberly analyse our Warriors’ participation at the 2017 AFCON finals.

Mine is not a witch-hunt but an attempt to find a way forward so we don’t continue making the same mistakes that cost us in Gabon.

I will begin by congratulating the Warriors, their technical staff, their sponsors and the entire nation for a deserved AFCON appearance.

For a football nation of our stature, merely being there at AFCON is something worth celebrating.

After our elimination, the chorus among most Zimbabweans was that there was no shame in being eliminated from a group that featured Algeria, Senegal and Tunisia.

They said we actually punched above our weight by scoring four goals in such a tight group.

Conceding only two goals against the number one ranked team in Africa was nothing to be ashamed of, some said.

Senegal’s first 11 is worth over $200 million, so what could our boys do faced with such a formidable outfit, some argued.

Algeria had Riyad Mahrez, who helped Leicester clinch an unlikely Premier League title in England last season.

But, fellow Zimbabweans, I’m not a defeatist and I have no intention of being one. There is no football team with a right to win a match on this earth.

When the AFCON groupings came out, our Group B was immediately labelled the “Group of Death” but to me this did not add up.

For here was a group with four teams, with only two AFCON titles among them being over-hyped to be called the tightest group of them all.

While our opponents are always at AFCON, it’s a fact they usually leave empty-handed. Because of that, I told myself that if we play our cards correctly, we could negotiate our way through this group into the quarter-finals.

The way we were bamboozled and run ragged by both Senegal and Tunisia left a bitter taste in the mouth.

The way we capitulated was not a true reflection of the gap in talent between ourselves and those two nations.

Firstly, we made Senegal look way better than what they actually are because of our shortcomings.

We started that match the way a match of that magnitude shouldn’t be started. We looked like we had no game plan, everyone looked jittery from the start and we were like lambs to the slaughter chamber.

We looked like we were almost expecting Senegal to score any moment and they duly complied.

After conceding, we never looked like equalising and we only started slowly creeping back into the match after conceding the second goal. That’s not how it’s done. To show that we were not learning anything at all, it was another slow and nervous start against Tunisia in our third match. No penetration, drive or ambition at all and, worst of all, we were very porous defensively.

We were not knocked out of AFCON because of having the misfortune of being in the strongest group at the finals.

We lost because of failing to grasp the basics of football.

Judging from our performances against both Senegal and Tunisia, I think we could have lost to anyone.

So let us not worry about where our opponents’ players play their club football or how much is the Senegal squad worth.

Soccer is not as plain and simple as we want to put it — that a team whose best player plies his trade at Liverpool should surely defeat one whose best player is in the Belgian league.

Talent helps a lot in a team, but it’s not everything and I believe very much in the power of the underdog.

Every team that qualifies for AFCON does so on merit and I see no reason for this inferiority complex.

To show that it’s not all about talent, why did that Senegal team that had El-Hadji Diouf, Camara and their current coach Cisse ultimately win nothing?

This shows it takes more than names and talent to win things and I can’t understand why we say it was written in the stars we would fall in this group because of its composition.

I have seen less-talented teams do wonders in this life — Leicester winning the Premiership, Iceland knocking England out of Euro 2016, Rubin Kazan beating mighty Barcelona in the Champions League to mention but a few.

It can definitely be done with the right mentality and attitude.

To illustrate my point, Senegal and Tunisia were beaten by Cameroon and Burkina Faso in the quarters.

Keita Balde, who our own Warriors had made to look like Messi, was totally shackled by an energetic and vibrant young Cameroon side and Sadio Mane was virtually anonymous.

Cameroon were set up with a proper game plan to neutralise Senegal’s danger men and it worked and Burkina Faso just weathered a first half storm and came firing in the second half.

I believe we still have a long way to go — properly planning for an opponent and trying to capitalise on their weak points.

We seem to go into matches with no game plan.

Why do our performances not improve as the tournament goes on to show that we are rectifying our mistakes?

Do we have an identity at all, as far as our type of playing is concerned?

These are some of the questions that I keep asking myself but finding no satisfactory answers.

I thought with pacy and tricky wingers like Billiat and Mahachi, our game would revolve around serious wing-play and crosses into the box for either Ndoro or Musona to feast on.

I also expected us to be a counter-attacking side with such pace upfront.

But the reality was that we were just a bunch of 11 players wandering aimlessly on the pitch.

As a way forward, we need to start matches far better than we did against Senegal and Tunisia and let’s identify our team’s strengths and model our type of play with those in mind.

I’m not in support of firing Pasuwa, let’s expose him to modern football techniques by sending him for attachments overseas.

I don’t support a foreign coach since we always engage useless ones.

Until we can engage a genuine foreigner, let’s stick with our own because, at least, our boys qualify for AFCON which, to me, is a big achievement.