Reflecting on Zambia’s loss to Equatorial Guinea

Alot has been said about Zambia’s 2-0 loss to Equatorial Guinea – a result that effectively ended the Chipolopolo’s chances of making a maiden appearance at the mundial next year in Qatar.

While even a blind man could see how the referee was bias and that bad officiating should be abhorred, have we asked ourselves whether Prince Mumba’s studs weren’t showing for the referee to follow the law to the latter and send him for an early shower on the day? Have we also asked how many shots we had at goal or our players’ unbridled appetite to miss the target?

The point really is that what we watched on Thursday evening is nothing new – even we could be guilty. It’s been there from the time of Zambia’s football rivalry with Uganda, right up to the infamous Jean-Fidel Diramba controversy in 1994 and up to this time of Bally.

Yet we still roll a red carpet for our tormentors when they play us on home soil. Sorry, I need to correct myself. We also actually seem to be learning the craft albeit slowly. I mean there was everything suspicious with Comorian referee Ali Mohamed Adelaid who helped us draw 3-3 against Algeria early this year to an extent that CAF even suspended him. Our own social media was lit in unison on how just biased the ref was towards the Chipolopolo. But it seems what was good for the goose that time, is bad for the gander this time.

You see folks, my travels across Africa as a sports journalist have exposed me to some of the most unforgiving terrains which FAZ should have known or know better. Football matches in the northern and western parts of Africa are won or lost at the airport, just when you arrive. For a curious football mind, there are some subliminal messages that are sent to you the moment you arrive that you are in for a spanking, a good hiding.

Sometimes, you can arrive at the airport without anyone from the hosting club or football federation being there to welcome you. And if they do, what they would sometimes refer to as ‘a red-carpet welcome’ is when they assign a canter truck to fetch you or send some rickety 1964 Volkswagen microbus where you’re packed like sardines to help overcome jet lag as a team. Fuel then runs out of the vehicle midway through your journey from the airport to the hotel.

Don’t ask the driver anything when that happens because he will deliberately answer back in Yoruba which none of you speaks or understands. Which reminds me of a trip Red Arrows once made to Aba State, near Port Harcourt, to play Enyimba in a Champions League match in 2005. A decision was made for the team to lay-over in Lagos. Their training menu in Nigeria’s largest city included a loosening session from a dumpsite, courtesy of the hosts where cadavers, flies and anything filthy you can think of, could be found. On the day of the match, the visitors’ dressing room had a cocktail of urine, faeces and sand pasted on the walls and benches. Before one could enter the facility, you had to jump over two weird-looking sticks that were crossed at the door. Final score? Arrows were beaten 3-0 after being on the receiving end of a 6-1 thrashing at home. It’s called football’s mind games.

On one trip to Algeria with Zanaco, the team was made to train in a basketball court before a crucial CAF Champions League match against JS Kabylie after being subjected to accommodation which even a backpacker would swear at. On the way to the stadium, we met fanatical fans gesturing death by slitting one’s throat, accompanied by gory images. Zanaco lost the game 3-0.

Ask coach Patrick Phiri what he once went through in Benin – a country considered as the birthplace of voodoo – before a crucial Africa Cup qualifying match in 2003. Seemingly high on something, some chap probably mistook his bald head for a small patch of fertile land where seed would germinate with the aid of urine. He then acutely positioned himself, unzipped his pair of trousers, let loose his bodily urinal pipe in the direction of the alley that separated the dressing room from the stadium, and let his member sprinkle his liquid waste on Phiri’s head.

If coach Phiri hadn’t fast realised that the liquid stuff drizzling high up from the stands wasn’t rain tailor-made for his head on a hot day, fecal matter would have perhaps followed. As if that wasn’t enough, the late Solly Pandor (may his soul rest in peace), who was the team manager, was banished from the stadium. The felony? The charge sheet read that in his bag, he could have been carrying some of the most potent Juju imported from Zambia into Benin that would have influenced the match result against the hosts. The Beninese could not just fathom that an Asian-looking man could be Zambian. Zambia was wired 3-0.

In comes 2004. Pointe-Noire, the Alphonse Massamba- Débat Stadium in Congo Brazzaville to be specific. Zambia were in a race to qualify for the World Cup which was hosted in Germany two years later. All odds were against the Chipolopolo from the airport. From one GBM losing $ 4,000 to pickpockets, we were then driven through streets where half of the buildings literally screamed at us that bullets and bombs had been dropped there in a recent civil war.

On the eve of the match, our hotel resident band sang and pounded their instruments throughout, with anyone barely sleeping coupled with veterans in the world’s oldest profession being nocturnally active – constantly knocking on our doors offering their services at a fee despite the obvious language barrier.

But they were convinced that their service was universal and was alien to any language interpretation just like football. On match day, we found dangling chicken heads with fresh blood oozing, ushering us into the Massamba- Débat Stadium. Had it not been for Collins Mbesuma running like a man possessed during the game, posting three goals against the hosts’ two, Kalusha Bwalya’s early outing as coach would have ended in tears.

Confronting the proverbial elephant in the room, we need to accept that no matter what excuses we give when we lose, football has failed the current administrators since they don’t want to accept that it’s them that have failed football.

If that’s still hard to admit, we need to accept that they have seemingly brought bad omens to Football House or that bad omens have continued following them even when the PF government, whom they accused of meddling in football affairs, have left the government. Failure to qualify for the Africa Cup on a record three times is not all because of bias officiating. Or failure to qualify for the next Under-20 Africa Cup after winning it in Lusaka in 2017 is not as a result of the PF alleged meddling in football issues.

No matter the semantics and euphemisms one chooses to use, Zambian football needs a total branch and root overhaul lest we continue losing to football virgins. Credit to the Football Association of Zambia executive (FAZ). They have sometimes given the team the best preps like camping the squad in Cameroon before the match in Equatorial Guinea. But maybe the national team players are tired of them, they want to see their backs – like the Chelsea players once conspired to have Jose Mourinho, one of the world’s best tacticians, fired.

Many people, unless those with ears at Football House will not know that because of administrative glitches that are sometimes synonymous with this FAZ, Zambia’s goalkeeper Mwenya Chibwe was almost missing the match against Equatorial Guinea and arrived late to join camp because someone charged with the responsibility of checking expiry dates for players’ passports had slept on duty. Did you see how jittery and flat-footed the goalkeeper was?

Staff at the FAZ secretariat need to be employed on merit, possibly through advertising vacancies, and shown the exit door when they fail to meet their KPIs. Reports we are hearing that there is a quiet recruitment drive for the Premier League Committee going on where someone is being primed for a role purely because of a suspected inappropriate relationship with someone within the football family should be nipped in the bud. Personally, I don’t want to believe this is true though inappropriate relationships are hard to prove. The Bembas say ‘kamboni mutima’ (your witness is your heart).

With coaches, we need to train our own. And we need to be patient with them after that and not frequently change them as we do with our trousers. Coaches that prioritize African football medicine at the expense of football’s academic knowledge should not be anywhere near our national teams.

In other countries, after failing to qualify for the Africa Cup three times, people could have summoned their collective football morals and resigned but can our administrators do so? I am told no because the lure of hopping from one plane to another in search of a stipend is too much to resist.

So, barring a miracle of the proportions of parting the Red Sea , we are stuck with this lot and so we may be with the impossibility of making it to any major tournaments and not the Cosafa.