Harambee Stars proved
to be another football debacle when they failed to beat Lesotho at the Nyayo
National Stadium, on 2 August! A 1-0 aggregate loss tossed them out of the
running for a ticket to next year’s African Nations Cup in Morocco. What
followed was equally catastrophic! Football Kenya Federation, FKF, disbanded
the entire team and sacked the Adel Amorouche-led technical bench, and replaced
it with outgoing Gor Mahia coach, Bobby Wiliamson, assisted by former
skipper,Musa Otieno and another former Stars man, Simeon Mulama as the team
manager. But wait a minute; this is just another disaster brewing in the pot!
It is no rocket
science that football structures, to develop players and nature talent from the
young age, are lacking. We have no properly structured under-age leagues and
structures upon which to identify talent and nature it progressively through
the Under 12, Undeer-15, Under-17 and Under 23, before ushering them into the
senior team. All we have are haphazardly arranged tem and under age
championships. The Kenya Premier League Limited, KPL, tried to organize an
Under-19 Kenya Premier league, with the teams drawn from the 16 clubs in the
top flight, a plan that worked for two seasons before it fizzled out and got
lost in the air. The Copa Coca Cola championship perhaps comes close to
replacing it and with the ample sponsorship from the soft drink giant manufacturer;
the tourney gives us a glimpse of the oozing football talent in the country.
However, do we really know where the stars of this annual championship
disappear into? Remember, the once prolific, Emmanuel Tostao who lit the 2009
Copa Coca Cola edition and went on to match some of Africa’s best in the
African Copa Coca Cola championship the same year in South Africa? What
happened to this talent that that poised to replace the aging Dennis Oliech in
the national team jersey? Years later, we heard of him in the Ingw’e camp, but
that is how far the story goes. The truth is that in Tostao, we missed the
chance to get the next Oliech!
As a federation, FKF
should ask te tough questions and see how many Tostao’s we have lost due to the
outrightly incapable management and administration of the beautiful game. The
federation has failed us. We have no age-group structures to develop the talent
from its tender age. Our County, Provincial and Nationwide leagues do not offer
much hope and optimism. Talents emerge during the annual secondary school
football championships, but if Thika United does not absorb them and nature
them, then the talent vanishes into thin air and gets eaten away playing the mtaani leagues!
As it stands now, the
Williamson-led technical bench will at a point find itself in an awkward
position as Amourouche did, and may not even rule the region by winning the
Confederation of Eastern and Central (CECAFA) championship, as Amourouche did
in Nairobi, last year. When that tragedy happens again, disbanding Harambee
Stars will not be the solution; it will instead be the irrational and
carelessly thought continuation of a debacle.
Let us invest in
structures and nature talent, both tactically and technically from its tender
age. This is how the likes of Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroun Cote D’Ivoire and
Algeria have ruled Africa, won the global under-age stages and exported world
beating talents to Europe! They did not heat up their heads trying to treat the
symptoms, as our local football federation does!
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