The Sunday News
Mehluli Sibanda, Senior Sports Reporter
ZIMBABWE Football Association board member, Bryton Malandule, who also chairs the association’s technical and development committee has promised tough action over the senior national men’s team pathetic display in the Cosafa Cup where the Warriors returned home from South Africa without a single win in the four matches they played.
The Zdravko Logarusic Warriors finished as the worst team at the Cosafa Cup with just two points secured from draws against Mozambique and Malawi. Zimbabwe lost to Namibia and Senegal to finish bottom of group B.
Zimbabwe and Malawi were the only teams that failed win a group match at the Cosafa Cup,which concludes this afternoon with South Africa and Senegal meeting in the final at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Gqeberha.
Angry Zimbabweans have called on the Felton Kamambo-led Zifa board to part ways with Logarusic whose record as Warriors coach is terrible. In the 12 matches he has presided over since he was appointed Zimbabwe coach at the beginning of 2020, Logarusic has one win, seven losses and four draws, which has left many wondering why Zifa have not yet sacked him.
Malandule said football decisions will certainly be made after the team’s pathetic display in South Africa. Saturday will see the technical and development committee meet Loga and his support staff before recommendations are made to the Zifa board, which has the final say.
“The hiring and firing of coaches is a preserve of the whole Zifa board, not the technical and development committee.
We can make a recommendation which can be thrown away by the board when they meet. We will meet and make appropriate recommendations. We understand the anxiety of the people, people are angry about the team’s performance and we are very sorry. We will meet and go through Loga and his technical team’s report and see weaknesses, if ever there are things that can be corrected because they work as a team, it’s not Loga himself but he has other guys, so it’s a collective team effort,” said Malandule.
He stated that they will make decisions that will ensure that there is no repeat of the Cosafa debacle in future.
“We will act in a manner that will ensure that when we go forward this thing should not be repeated. It’s a collective decision, I did not say we are meeting to fire Loga, we are meeting to correct things. If part of the correction is maintaining Loga and doing abcd so be it, if the committee sees it fit.
“Our desire when we send people to a tournament is to compete and win tournaments, not just to say we are developmental, we are making experiments, you cannot play with people’s emotions. We are serious as a board about the performance of the Warriors and you will see in the coming weeks with the decisions that will be made that they are progressive decisions, we are not going to be emotional, we will sit down and analyse everything and give people a chance to put everything on the table,’’ Malandule said.
On what was Loga’s mandate when the Warriors went to the 20th edition of the Cosafa Cup, Malandule made it clear that the Croatian was expected to win the regional competition.
“From a board point of view, we expected these guys to go and win the tournament, that was the mandate. That is why we sacrificed our little resources, we cannot send people, when we don’t have money to on holiday, to go and make experiments.
“We sent them to go and win. Someone came all way from the USA, we had Mapisa (Mapisa) from Spain, those are serious players so we expected better performances, so let’s wait and see the explanation from the coach as to why did perform dismally like this,’’ he said.
Zimbabwe start their 2022 Fifa World Cup qualifiers in September. The Warriors are in group g together with Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa. It remains to be seen if Loga survives to take charge of Zimbabwe’s quest to book a ticket to Qatar. — @Mdawini_29.
