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NewsDay

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The perils of a soccer coach

Opinion & Analysis
Lloyd Chigowe, popularly known as Mablanyo in football circles, became the second coaching casualty of the 2019 Castle Lager Premier Soccer League season, which is just four weeks old.

EDITORIAL

Lloyd Chigowe, popularly known as Mablanyo in football circles, became the second coaching casualty of the 2019 Castle Lager Premier Soccer League season, which is just four weeks old.

While the sacking of Mablanyo on Tuesday morning hardly surprised some, to others it was a shock, considering that he had just presided over four matches, where he oversaw one win a and three defeats.

The most bizarre shake-up of the coaching department was that of Bulawayo Chiefs where Thulani Sibanda, who had left the club prior to the beginning of the season, was hastily roped back in after the team suffered a 5-0 defeat in the season curtain raiser against Chapungu.

Joseph Sibindi has remained in the technical team, but it is an open secret that it is Sibanda calling the shots following his return. Sibanda was brought back as a fitness trainer to mask his true role as he does not possess the required qualifications to be the head of the technical team.

Down in the Eastern Division One, ambitious side Green Fuels have parted ways with Taku Shariwa after an indifferent start to the campaign.

What these three stories have taught us is that there is no job security in local football, and clubs have become so desperate for success that they can even wield the axe on a coach just 90 minutes into the season.

In the Chigowe case, Dynamos, is a club that had to rebuild from scratch after they lost almost the entire squad from last season, only retaining four players.

It was not Chigowe’s fault that the team lost that many players; it was because there was no money at the team.

And when there is no money, blame lies squarely with the administration, who themselves should have left their positions after losing an entire squad.

Success in football is not an overnight thing, and that is why in Europe, clubs spend millions to develop players and then teams.

Dynamos players have only just started to play together, and such can only get better as they play more matches.

Expecting that Dynamos would just steam roll over other teams just because they are the once mighty De Mbare is plain unreasonable to say the least.

Considering where Dynamos were coming from, it was actually good that they even got that first win, and the way they played showed that with time, they could be a formidable unit.

Tonderai Ndiraya is a brave man to come back and take up a job so insecure one could lose it over three matches.

Ndiraya was also left in the cold after leading the team to a second place finish in the 2015 campaign that was eventually won by Chicken Inn.

He knows the perils of the De Mbare job, where the management believes that they have the right to win everything.

Football does not work like that any more. FC Platinum invested for years before they won their first title.

After that, success seems to be coming easier for them and clubs like De Mbare, Bulawayo Chiefs, Green Fuels and even Ngezi Platintum, who sacked Ndiraya last year after management assumed the team would not be able to win the league towards the end of the campaign, need to understand that patience is one of the main principles of success in sport.

Success doesn’t come overnight; it is a product of planning and perseverance. Some teams, it seems do not want to learn the lesson.