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DROWN THE SHOREMEN

10/09/2019 00:58:00 BY Lwazi's Pandora's Boxs

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My dearest readers...

In describing the national team Sihlangu’s winless streak some years ago, I allowed the grey mush I call my brain to come up with this line – “Even Djibouti doesn’t get any jitters at the prospect of facing Sihlangu!”

It was meant to be a joke or at least to demonstrate how we have fallen on hard times as a football nation. Now after Djibouti beat Sihlangu 2-1 last Wednesday (a game I followed on You Tube) I should have been served thin slices of humble pie because the unthinkable just happened.

It cannot be passed on as a joke anymore. It is reality now and never mind that this was Djibouti’s second win in history, having beaten Somalia in July this year.

If Sihlangu was a person, it will be mired in a mid-life crisis. Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world, qualified for the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) 2019 in Egypt for the first time in history yet here we are, 51 years into independence, and we still haven’t won even the COSAFA Cup, never mind reaching its final.

traumatic

There was a traumatic period – before the current Minister of Sports, Culture and Youth Affairs, Harries ‘Madze’ Bulunga, breathed life into the team – when the national team were not just on a long winding winless streak but couldn’t even score a goal. This angst-ridden arm-chair critic even remarked that whosoever scores a goal for Sihlangu must be installed as ‘chief’ in his home area. We were that bad.

After the mismanagement by you-know-who as Sihlangu coach; playing colourless and direction-less football in an incumbency that was a procession of regression, enter Kostadin Papic, the former amiable coach of that great football institution founded in Orlando East in 1937, Orlando Pirates Football Club. He is trying a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of the ‘critical but stable’ Sihlangu Semnikati. He is trying his damndest to cajole the team back into life. As expected, it has not been an easy stroll in the park. But his calming influence, being a player’s coach, needless to say, meticulous, humble, hard-working, diligent and intelligent augurs well for the national team.

Granted, the loss to Djibouti was the lowest point in his tenure as Sihlangu coach, which is barely a year old. That’s why today, at Mavuso Sports Centre, he needs no reminder that his boys have to show up. His boys do not need to just show up but win convincingly to overturn the first leg 1-2 embarrassing loss.

Papic knows better than anyone that he needs his boys to stamp their authority because anything less than a convincing win and progression into the group stages of the 2022 World Cup would be deemed as failure - in both the country’s official languages. It will be a crushing cul-de-sac. It would even place him on the precipice that could precipitate his exit. I can’t even imagine what his band of critics who are waiting with sharpened knives would say if he fails to take Sihlangu to the next stage this afternoon.

It goes without saying that today’s clash against the Shoremen of the Red Sea is a do or die; kill or be killed kind of clash. Sihlangu have a choice today. To lie down and die or defy the odds and achieve a great feat of reaching the Group stages of the 2022 World Cup Qualifiers.

Believers in the country please unite and say a collective prayer for Sihlangu. They will need dollops of luck, and some divine intervention will not hurt today.

Kubo Majaha!