Can Mapeza steer Warriors ship?

SUNDAY CHIDZAMBWA’S resignation from his post as Warriors coach on Wednesday was celebrated in some domestic football circles as a welcome development in the wake of the team’s poor AFCON finals performance. He is the latest of a number of coaches who were in charge of teams at the AFCON finals in Egypt who have left their posts — either voluntarily or having been pressured to do so by their employers.

There is no doubt the Warriors’ poor show in Egypt still hurts and that Madagascar ended up going all the way to the quarter-finals will always be a reminder to us of our failures.

While Chidzambwa could be faulted for this and that, we don’t believe he is the only reason we underperformed in Egypt because, as far as we have analysed, there were many things that we didn’t do right.

Chief among them was letting our players get their focus deflected by issues related to their financial rewards, which kept brewing unrest in our camp.

We are not here to apportion any blame because these distractions have been dealt with, and being dealt with, at different levels of authority in the post-mortem that has followed that campaign.

What we are worried about is the future, and in the wake of Chidzambwa’s resignation, we now have a national team without a leader while major assignments are just on the horizon.

On Monday, the draw for the 2020 World Cup qualifiers will be made in Cairo, Egypt, and our name will go into the hat and we are set to play in the preliminary round of the qualifiers, after missing the main round by just one place.

That means our campaign starts in September this year, rather than in March next year and we don’t have the luxury of time to headhunt for a competent coach who will guide our Warriors in the World Cup qualifiers because, we only have just about 40 days before we plunge into action.

It all puts the ZIFA board in a difficult position because it’s not easy to get a very competent coach, within the timeframe left, who can then get our World Cup campaign off to a good start.

For one, ZIFA do not have the money to bring in a very good foreign coach who is likely to ask for, at least, US$20 000 a month and other luxuries and, even if they had the funds, these foreign coaches have barely succeeded here.

Time, also, will not be on the coach’s side given that, within the next few weeks, he will have to start studying our players, learning about them and deciding who should, and who should not be considered, for World Cup duty.

That is why we believe that, maybe, for now, the solution for us lies in our local resources and while ZIFA cannot lure Norman Mapeza from his secure job at FC Platinum, given the challenges we face, he remains our best bet for the start of the World Cup qualifiers.

As shown by the Madagascar and DRC coaches at the recent AFCON finals, national team coaches can hold dual roles — guiding their countries and also taking care of their teams — at the same time.

After all, the Warriors, at most, play about five games a year and the good thing is that when they do, in either the AFCON or the World Cup qualifiers, the domestic engagements are stopped.

Mapeza started the 2019 AFCON qualifying campaign in style with a 3-0 win over Liberia and it’s important to note that, after that match, we never scored as many goals in a single match in the games we later played.

He has also been panel-beaten by his adventures in the CAF Champions League with FC Platinum where, as a coach, he keeps picking vital lessons that have made him a better gaffer than he was two years go.

Maybe, given the fix that we find ourselves in, and the fact that we don’t have time to make any experiments, Mapeza could be the man who can be asked to take of the Warriors when they start their World Cup campaign.

He knows the players and had worked with many of them before and while there will always be a constituency that says we need a foreign coach, we don’t believe that getting one means the end of our troubles.

There are a lot of things we need to get right in our football and one of them is that, in this age and era, we can’t have a technical team that doesn’t have such key personnel as analyst, conditioning coaches, not fitness trainers, and dietitians.

Check the Algeria coaching team and you will find about 12 people who make that department, each a specialist in his or her field and, while they might not all sit on the bench, they play a very big role.

The AFCON finals showed us that, given the right conditions, home coaches can succeed and both finalists — Algeria and Senegal — were under the guidance of their local boys while all the expensive expatriates had either been fired or were about to be fired.

We don’t have time and ZIFA should act now because we can’t afford not to do well in the World Cup qualifiers, especially after our AFCON nightmare.