By MICHAEL KARIATI
EVENTS in other football playing nations around the world over the past week have exposed how incapable we are as a nation when it comes to preparing our own beloved Warriors for important international assignments like the upcoming World Cup qualifiers.
While the rest of the world was busy playing preparatory matches on the designated Fifa international window for friendly matches, Warriors players who are currently on offseason breaks were sitting at home doing nothing or glued to their television sets watching others play.
With the South African and European football leagues on a break, it would have been the natural move by Zifa to provide Warriors coach Zdravko Logarusic with the opportunity to assess players like Brendan Galloway, who have never played for the Warriors before.
What the Zimbabwean football authorities are forgetting is that time is moving and there won’t be any other opportunity for the European based players to turn out for the Warriors in warm up matches before the World Cup qualifiers get into motion.
What is ironic is that even lowly-ranked African teams like the Comoros, Liberia, Eswatini, Sudan and Mauritania took to the field on the Fifa dates for friendlies after realising the importance of preparing fully for this coming World Cup qualifiers.
The explanation from those at the headquarters of football at 53 Livingston Avenue was that they are waiting for the arrival of the 2021 edition of the Cosafa Cup to put into gear the Warriors’ preparations for the 2022 World Cup.
Surely, how can a nation with serious World Cup football ambitions rely on a developmental tournament like the Cosafa Cup to prepare a team that will face the Black Stars of Ghana in World Cup qualifiers?
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For the record, the Cosafa Cup was introduced in 1997 as a developmental regional tournament and that is the reason why countries like South Africa do not field their real Bafana Bafana, but their developmental players.
Zimbabwe has in the past opted for their foreign based stars against very weak opponents instead of giving the chance to future young stars for their development.
In fact, Fifa does not take this Cosafa Cup tournament seriously and views it as a gathering of national teams for practice matches with their outcome having no significance at all on the world rankings.
In fact, clubs are not obliged to release their players for this Cosafa Cup tournament, raising questions as to how the Warriors will prepare for the World Cup without the majority of their foreign based contingent.
On that premise, the Cosafa Cup — just like the previous friendly against Malawi — will serve no purpose to the Warriors’ preparations for Qatar 2022 as the players for the World Cup qualifiers will not take part in the competition.
What is disturbing is that those running the game are the first to point fingers at the coach when failure hits the Warriors yet they did not create the environment that guaranteed the team’s success.
With five Nations Cup final qualifications, the Warriors have earned respect across the length and breadth of African football and could have attracted the best opponents for World Cup preparatory matches.
There were so many not so big but quality teams like Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Uganda, the DRC, Congo Brazzaville, and Cape Verde, whom Zimbabwe could have played to their benefit and to that of Logarusic.
Sadly, though, Zimbabwe has not learnt anything since 1980 and continues to use old fashioned and cheap ways of preparations when others are moving forward and investing in their national teams.
At this time, last year, Zifa went bragging that they had enough financial resources to support the Warriors. So what happened to the money when the Warriors cannot afford a single 2022 World Cup warm up match?
Whatever explanation Zifa will give, nobody will listen to them because of their well-documented history of financial mismanagement and failure to do the right things at the right time.
The truth is that we might have ridden on luck in our Afcon qualification now and before but the World Cup is not about luck but seriousness — something that we sadly lack.
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