Inside sport: Zifa committee rushing itself

Zifa committee rushing itself

THE 'milk and honey' promised with the coming on board of the Zifa normalisation committee might not be so with the little that we have seen so far.

The Lincoln Mutasa-led four-team Committee seems to be rushing things in order to appease the crowd outside there instead of making the right decisions and for that matter step by step.

In fact, Mutasa and friends are putting pressure on themselves by trying to be seen to be doing something instead of diligently dealing with issues one after the other.

Everything is being done in a haphazard manner and forgotten is that they alone cannot do everything but that responsibilities are shared with particular qualified people tasked to deal with certain issues.

In reality, this normalisation committee represents the Zifa Board in charge of appointing responsible committees and they only come in to see to it that everything is running smoothly instead of being the hands-on-characters themselves.

For example, there was no need to advertise for the many posts of all Zimbabwe national team coaches before appointing a technical committee that is well versed in such matters.

This presents a danger like the one that took place the last time around when Zdravko Logarusic was given the mantle to handle the Zimbabwean team because the Zifa board did the appointment on their own yet they did not have an idea of what sort of coach was required.

Unless of course, if the normalisation committee is telling the nation that they are only gathering the applications and then a technical committee would then go through them.

Everyone knows that Zimbabwe urgently needs a national team coach to take charge of the Chan and the 2026 World Cup assignments but it is the way the normalisation committee has gone around it that is wrong.

At one go, they want to fill the posts of Warriors coach, the Mighty Warriors coach, the men’s Under 23, Under 20, and Under 17 coaches, as well as the women’s Under 20, and Under 17 coaches.

That is not all …They also at the same time want to appoint the assistant coaches for all these five teams' age groups for both men and women.

That is not the end of it …The normalisation committee during the same period also wants to employ three goalkeepers’ coaches and three fitness trainers.

The question is : Are the four members of the Normalization Committee — all not well versed in technical matters — going to look into these applications and make a determination on whom to appoint ?

Isn’t that too much to work on at one goal with the deadline for submissions just around the corner on August 11?

Won’t the huge amount of work involved overwhelm them to the extent of forcing them to make the wrong choice of coaches ?

We thought the ideal situation would have been to deal with one team after the other, starting with those with immediate assignments, like the senior men’s team - the Warriors.

That is the team that at the moment the normalisation committee should focus on since they have Chan assignments in September which will then be followed by World Cup Qualifiers in November.

The suggestion is for the temporary appointment of a local coach or coaches to take care of this around-the-corner Chan competition while the normalisation committee is working on the recruitment of a full time Warriors coach.

After all, the Chan competition is for locally based players and there are too many coaches in Zimbabwe capable of handling that team as evidenced by the high quality of football in the Premier Soccer League.

The fact remains that the normalisation committee has direction and big ideas to make Zimbabwean football a success again, but doing everything on their own could lead to failure.

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