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SIHLANGU: WHERE TO FROM HERE?

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My dearest readers ...

 


If I had a dime each time Sihlangu is said to have ‘played well’ but failed to qualify for a major tournament, I would be a stinking rich millionaire rather than preaching to the converted which some of us do for a living or as my favourite Sunday Times columnist, Ndumiso Ngcobo would put it, I would be a ‘Gwebu’. For the uninitiated, in his column recently, Ngcobo told us that when he was still a 10-year-old urchin, he spent many Saturday afternoons playing football against a team that went by the name, ‘Control Ltd’.

Don’t ask why. One of their teammates was a rotund butterball called ‘Gwebu’ (Bubble). He never made the starting line-up, so he became their unofficial mascot who ran up and down the touchline like a possessed demon, insulting and demoralising Control Ltd’s opponents. If you got nutmegged by one of their players, Gwebu would lose his goddamned mind and roll around the floor like tumbleweed in ecstasy.


disdain


This brings me to one of my uncles from my extended family who has unhealthy disdain for men who do not have ‘real jobs’ and by ‘real job’, he means those that involve some kind of tool; a hammer, a sickle, a set of spanners or a drill. If you were to explain to him what I do for a living, he would probably ask;” Do you mean umshana doesn’t actually play football? He gets paid just to be ‘Gwebu’?”


You can laugh here, you son of a gun. Kliklikliklikliklikli. Thank you very much. You see, words like ‘gallant’, ‘brave’ are rare as a hen’s-tooth to be pre-fixed with the name ‘Sihlangu’, but the 2-all draw away in Zambia on Saturday in a crunch 2020 CHAN qualifier would be appropriate given the stalemate.
But the sad reality is that once again, we are OUT of a continental tournament just like we will be watching FIFA’s crown jewel – the 2022 World Cup to be organised by Qatar – from the comfort of our living rooms. It still hurts like it happened yesterday that we were beaten by lowly ranked Djibouti, a bunch of part-timers who would have lost by a cricket score to the mighty Times XI any-day.


The latest scenario where the nation’s pride put up a good performance in overturning a 2-0 deficit to end up with a credible 2-all draw which, needless, to say was not enough, reminded me of a joke once shared by one of my naughty friends, with a face resembling a deflated football and who drinks like a fish. It was a joke about a farmer attempting to milk a particularly fidgety cow. Finally, he is so exasperated he ties one of its legs to a kraal gatepost and then uses his belt to tie the other leg to the opposite gatepost.


pants


At that moment his pants slide down his legs and his wife walks out of the house to be met with the sight of a farmer standing behind a spread-eagled cow, his hands around the cow’s udder and his pants around his knees. The punch-line to the joke is: “Some things you just can’t explain.”


I believe that at some point during the summer of 1997, former US President Bill Clinton stood in the middle of the White House main bedroom staring at Hillary with a succinct appreciation of the meaning of that phrase. Heek, heek, heek, heek. I digress. But talking of Bill Clinton, his striking resemblance, Kostadin Papic must be wondering, like many of us, who are level-headed and genuinely love our national team, why is that Sihlangu not only gets to play well away from home but scores more than one goal yet they just cannot score at home?
This I really can’t explain.


Subscribers to the denizen of the world of spooks point towards our modest venue being cursed and even more bewildering, members of the ‘Special Projects’ being at ‘war’ and Sihlangu being the collateral damage.


Forgive me you but I snigger at ‘archaic superstitious beliefs’ even though in my school days at St. Christopher’s High School, I used to ‘munch on wafers and sip on Sedwick’s Old Brown Sherry’ every Sunday in the belief that I was eating the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
That’s why I take what they say with a lorry load of salt but I can’t argue otherwise given the prevailing scenario where the national team has not won an international fixture at Mavuso Sports Centre. We are talking of SEVEN consecutive games here!


This is long before we offered the poisoned chalice that is the Sihlangu coaching job to the amiable Serbian, in the process making him the lowest paid national team coach in the region.


qualifiers


We are facing Guinea Bissau away in 22 days and then in 27 days from now, Sadio Mane and Co. will be here for the second of the 2021 AFCON qualifiers. Where to from here?


I seriously believe perhaps after the two forthcoming games, whether the Eswatini Football Association (EFA) renews coach Papic’s contract or not, we need a FOOTBALL INDABA involving all the football stakeholders so that we can do a SWOT analysis of our current football situation in this country and then come up with possible solutions.

The EFA needs to be accountable for their actions and cannot continue to offer lip service about development programmes or do the same thing over and over again and then expect a different result. I have said this before, I will say it again, without fear of contradiction, German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein has a word for it – MADNESS. It sure comes in many forms.
It is time to end the cycle of misery.

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