Swimmer Kirsty Coventry was the burnished jewel yet again, joined late this year by the country’s junior football teams. Winner of 12 medals in major competitions this year, no individual sportsperson has held so many enthralled, all of the nation captivated, as much as Kirsty Leigh Coventry has in the past few years.
Beginning 2004 Kirsty has epitomised all that we have never before witnessed in Zimbabwean sport: whole-hearted commitment to her cause, unbridled passion for her motherland, and a squeaky clean image off the pool. To have won three Olympic medals at 21 is in itself a tremendous achievement. For a Zimbabwean, it was epochal.
That she was able to inject the same enthusiasm at lesser competitions at the All Africa Games this year speaks volumes about her commitment. Where others shirking national duty would have developed migraines and pulled hamstrings before the competition, she simply shrugged on her costume and collected for her country ten medals.
But the nations’ failure this year to make it into the Nations Cup for the first time in four years again turned the senior football team from giants into the continent’s Cinderella’s. Yet again there was little preparation before matches, no friendly matches to speak about. If Malaysia and Vietnam hadn’t issued out invitations late this year, how many matches would the Warriors have completed?
To be fair, that the Warriors performances were utterly listless throughout their campaign cannot always be blamed on administration. One had to admit that in a year when the team had the rare luxury of all their players available to them, any shortcomings in the aftermath are best answered by the coach.
In February last year, national coach Charles Mhlauri took a bubbling football team to the Nations Cup in Egypt, leading them to a disastrous first two matches against Senegal and Nigeria, before ultimately proclaiming a successful campaign as they ambushed a depleted and jaded Ghana in their very last match.
It was a curiously bizarre sight, then, to see Mhlauri virtuously sparring with the press – and for most part beating them in intellectual arguments – while offering surprisingly insightful comments as a television pundit, only to meekly surrender on the pitch to less gifted coaches on the continent.
It's not that one wished any malice on Mhlauri, seemingly the bearer of football standards in the country, when he lost his job at Zifa; or indeed Kevin Curran, with his blithe explanations for Zimbabwe’s poor form at cricket. But having been lectured to for so long by corporate saps and administrators about the almost superhuman qualities of coaches and bureaucrats, it was delicious to see a few crash and burn.
Indeed, we ought to be grateful for small mercies like the hiring and firing of coaches, the non-renewal of contracts, boardroom coups against incompetents and so on.
More should follow, and on top of the list should be all the flailing administrators who have banished athletics, 15s rugby and hockey from the public memory by sleeping on their jobs while their sports burned.
It cannot be held against Cara Black that she is the only female tennis player in the country worth talking about. At the time of writing she had apparently searched in vain for somebody to partner her at the Olympics next year. Tennis black without the Blacks?
Where does League champions and Zimbabwe’s representatives at next year’s African Champions league, Dynamos, stand in all this? To be honest nowhere. Zimbabwean soccer in recent times has resembled schoolboy standards and the teams they beat on their way to the Champions League final in 1998 have maintained theirs. Without wishing to be unkind, everything does beg the question as to why it took them ten years to retain the premiership title from clubs that have consistently failed in Africa.
But the country’s youth are going great guns. Last week two brothers, James and Mathew Lawson, broke long standing swimming records, and reports from the Herald point out that an 11-year-old Chisipite girl, Samantha Welch, is also breaking some of Kirsty’s schoolgirl records, which is where the former also began way back in 1997 as a 13-year-old.
The nation’s soccer age group sides are on a roll. The recently triumphant under-17s and 20s seemed to carry a lot of baggage with them before their tournaments. The coach appointed to take care of the under-17s, it was said, is one that nobody has ever heard of. The under-20s are coached by one that Highlanders fans will not hear of.
Both views are, of course, entirely irrelevant. The unknown has triumphed, and people’s views about the region that Rodwell Dhlakama comes from are deeply conceited and should not be endorsed in any way against the under-17s coach.
But the first scenario has left Methembe detractors anxious and fumbling, and their executive in flux following reports of eminent shake-up in the club’s coaching department; for how do you off-load a coach who has just won a regional tournament without looking like total dunces thereafter?
Happily, none of that matters right now, and while nobody seems to be able to explain this sudden change of fortunes in our junior sides, it’s hard to care, thanks to Methembe Ndlovu, Dhlakama and their boys. Zifa is vindicated, and we drink instead to the joy that youth has brought us.
