COACH-LESS, LEADERLESS, WIN-LESS, CLUELESS
:e are in a real mess and Lincoln Mutasa appears to be stuck in a football world when transfer windows didn’t exist, and a back pass was allowed to be collected by a ‘keeper using his hands. I can’t understand how such an educated man, who did his BA in Electrical Engineering at London’s Imperial College, and his MBA at the University of Leeds, could be getting get a lot of things wrong the way he has been doing.
LINCOLN MUTASA is a nice guy — he is cool, speaks like a natural leader and has a very clean reputation, both as a man, and a businessman. He also boasts of an impressive CV as an excellent football administrator.
After all, he is the same man who, at one time during his four-year stint as Dynamos chairman, did something no other leader at DeMbare has ever done — invest in real estate.
That was the time when a piece of land in Waterfalls was acquired in the ‘80s before the vultures came and parcelled it among themselves and lost it to banks after failing to clear the club’s debts.
The ‘80s was the golden years for the Glamour Boys with Dynamos winning SEVEN of the 10 league championships during that period.
Only Black Rhinos (twice in ’84 and ’87) and Zimbabwe Saints (’88) prevented the Glamour Boys from a clean sweep of 10 out of 10 league championships.
Those were the years when Dynamos were the true flagship franchise of domestic football, the people’s team which even attracted the myth that it had seven million fans.
That was a different Dynamos to the shell that we have today, connected to the real Glamour Boys only by name, and history, abandoned by the millions of fans who used to call it the football club of their dreams.
Now, some of them are saying it’s no longer DeMbare but DeMarriot, whatever that means.
Mutasa’s distinguished service at Dynamos, both as a player and a leader, brought a lot of hope among local fans that his rise to become ZIFA boss was just what the doctor had ordered.
He appeared to be the perfect guy to provide the leadership, even on an interim basis, and restore stability to an organisation which had been on autopilot towards its destruction for some time.
But, almost a year into his time as ZIFA boss, Mutasa appears to have been infected by the Marriot Syndrome and is now leading the association down the wrong path, the same way his colleague is doing at Dynamos.
He has failed, in one year, to prepare the roadmap for elections for the substantive ZIFA board to be held, as prescribed by FIFA when he was appointed.
Of course, there is a group that claims this was deliberate because Mutasa wanted his term of office to be extended given the rich monthly cash pickings his management team are receiving from FIFA for doing absolutely nothing.
Imagine these are guys who are picking something like US$5 000 a month, tax-free, for among other things, just shifting the ZIFA base from 53 Livingstone Avenue to some rented house in Milton Park.
For someone whose highlight in club football administration was that acquisition of that vast piece of land for Dynamos, isn’t it ironic that his first major decision as ZIFA boss was to move its headquarters into a rented house?
If Mutasa could see the value in Dynamos investing in property in 1983, which they did, why then did he now see a value in ZIFA abandoning the house they own to move into a rented property, 40 years down the road, in 2023?
By the end of June, FIFA would have sunk in hundreds of thousands of US dollars into the ZIFA coffers since the normalisation committee started work but I doubt if that huge investment will tally with the work that has been done on the ground.
For goodness sake, they have failed to even hold elections, within the prescribed period, and Mutasa and his colleagues will probably justify all that investment by saying their fired the technical director and the CEO and replaced them with new faces.
MUTASA IS OUT OF DEPTH, OUT OF TOUCH
They will also probably say they toured Rwanda, and they loved visiting this picturesque land of a thousand hills and they also had a good time in Malawi for that Four Nations tourney which, in terms of real value for us, was just a waste of time.
We didn’t get to see the new boys from England in action, for one reason or another, in what should have been a perfect platform for them to give us a glimpse of their quality.
I always had this impression that anyone who would replace Kamambo would have the easiest of jobs simply because I thought it was impossible to get anyone who could do worse than what Felton did.
Of course, I was wrong because in the past year Mutasa has proved to be out of depth with the demands of a modern day ZIFA president.
He appears to be still stuck in ’83.
He probably believes the world’s best song right now is “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, the 3D printer has just been invented and the world’s first commercial mobile cellular telephone call has been made in Chicago, the United States.
He probably still believes we have just heard that two separate research groups have declared that a novel retrovirus may have been infecting people with HIV/AIDS.
And, Mutasa appears to be stuck in a football world when transfer windows didn’t exist and a back pass was allowed to be collected by a ‘keeper using his hands.
Because, I can’t understand how such an educated man, who did his BA in Electrical Engineering at London’s Imperial College, and his MBA at the University of Leeds, could be getting get a lot of things wrong the way he has been doing.
He is a man who was smart enough to complete his MBA while also juggling with the tough task of leading Dynamos and that suggests he is someone of sound mind and should be trusted when it comes to judgment.
But, I get this feeling that, in the past year, we haven’t seen anything to suggest that this is the same Mutasa who, between ’83 and ’87, built a legacy of excellence, when it comes to leadership in football.
For a man of his age, Mutasa appears to be in very good health and that even makes it difficult for some of us to understand why he is failing to execute simple assignments like the engagement of a national team coach.
How does it feel, Mr Mutasa, that we are the only national team, among the scores of African countries trying to fight for a place at the 2026 World Cup, who don’t have a coach, just weeks before our next game?
How do all the men and women running ZIFA today justify their relevance when they just can’t execute a simple task like appointing a coach for the Warriors, who are their biggest baby?
How does Jethro Hunidzarira, another blast from the past, justify his relevance as a technical director of an association which can’t even appoint a national team coach?
At Zimbabwe Saints, where he starred as a player in the ‘80s, he was affectionately known as Chemmie Hunidzarira.
He has spent the majority of his working life in the trenches of Botswana football where he probably made an impression on Mutasa whose company, Tasionics (Pvt) Ltd, has footprints in that country.
Chemmie also appears to be a nice man but this isn’t a show for the nice guys, this is about running a football association and when you fail such basics, like appointing a national coach, you don’t deserve to be in those leadership roles.
WE ARE IN A REAL MESS
If I was Lincoln Mutasa, I would have told my colleagues at ZIFA that this isn’t the time for experiments by bringing in a coach, who doesn’t know anything about the Warriors, and giving him the responsibility to lead them in their next two World Cup games.
The brutal reality is that we just don’t have the time for such a coach to come and prepare the players, and help them understand his vision, in the few weeks between now and those two games.
Coaches choose the players they want to work with and it’s not the responsibility of ZIFA to choose those players like what they did when the Warriors played at the Four Nations tourney in Malawi and what they are trying to do now.
Mutasa hinted recently that their technical committee will take care of the selection of the players for the two World Cup qualifiers next month.
Now, how do ZIFA then hold the coach responsible for his results when he did not choose the players he used, including some he probably never wanted anywhere near his team?
When a coach chooses a player, it’s not just about the fact that the player is good and doing well but it’s also influenced by whether that player can fit into way the gaffer would want to play against certain opposition.
I’m told Chemmie Hunidzarira, by virtue of being the ZIFA technical director, is the head of that technical committee which will choose the squad of Warriors for the two battles next month.
But, I doubt whether Chemmie really knows our players and who should be included in the Warriors.
I have a feeling that he is probably a better specialist when it comes go selecting players for the Zebras of Botswana rather than our Warriors.
So, because of ZIFA’s bungling, we now find ourselves in a mess and a desperate situation where we have a constituency of our fans even calling for Baltemar Brito to be called back to coach the Warriors.
To be fair to him, he probably holds the record of being the only national team coach without a defeat in the world.
His two games in charge of a country, both in World Cup qualifiers, ended in two draws and, given where his team was coming from, that was a fair return by the Brazilian.
The irony for me, though, comes when those, who are fighting in Brito’s camp, suddenly find fault lines among those fighting in Sunday Chidzambwa’s case, pointing to Mhofu’s age amid suggestions that football left him behind.
For the record, Mhofu turned 72 last Saturday and Brito turned 72 on January 9 this year.
They are both former central defenders and are both from the Brazilian school of football.
The same guys have no problem with former AFCON winner, Winfried Schafer, saying he wants to come to be the next coach of the Warriors even though, at 74, he is older than both Mhofu and Brito.
Right now, we are in a real mess. Thanks of course to Chendisaita Lincoln Mutasa and his colleagues at ZIFA, an association which appears to be infected with viruses which turn good men into bad guys once they associate themselves with it.
To God Be The Glory!
Peace to the GEPA Chief, the Big Fish, George Norton, Daily Service, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and all the Chakariboys still in the struggle.
Come on Chegutu Pirates!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Zaireeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
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