By Tawanda Chari
It was a disappointing AFCON tournament for the
Zimbabwe Warriors. Worse still, the national football team in general has been
disappointing across all fronts for some time now. Coaches/managers have been
hired and fired. Technical teams changed and reshuffled to not much success.
Some media persons then create an array of misconstrued,
misdirected, and decontextualized speculation-based
drivel that serves no purpose and heightens ignorance about head coaches when
the team fails. A graveyard for truth.
There are of course good talking points but they appear
minuscule in comparison at the moment.
What's The Significance Of Managers Then?
The bottom-line is this: if you assemble a squad of
players with talent and the right attitude
and character, you’ll win more football matches than
you lose. Coaches rarely have time to do the grunt work of picking up the right
players and profiles of those players. It's exhausting. So, instead of trying to find the ideal
Coach, why not build a competent team premised
on the above-mentioned criteria?
Football Associations have historically tended to hire
incompetent staff. The individual football manager has probably become even less important in recent years.
Managers at successful Associations now tend to work with dozens of staffers, ranging from
physical trainers, defensive/offensive
coaches, to data
analysts and sports psychologists.
In modern football it makes more sense to talk of management
teams rather than individual managers. It’s doubtful anyway whether ZIFA choose
a manager chiefly
because they think he will maximize performance. Often the manager is chosen more for his
suitability as a symbolic figurehead than for his
perceived competence.
That’s because the national team exists only partly to
win matches. Its other job
is to incarnate country’s eternal spirit. So a national team has to be the nation-made flesh. A manager/head
coach is hired to incarnate the nation more than to win matches. Fans care way
too much about where a coach comes from and not specifically what he is and can
grow into.
When it comes to knowledge, the world divides into liberals and conservatives. Conservatives tend to believe that some things are better left unknown. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to believe that even if we don’t know how something works, patient analysis will eventually reduce the problem to a manageable set of proven relationships. Most fans and media seem unaware of all the analysis that goes into preparing games. What the public sees isn’t necessarily what’s happening. So ZIFA gets cut some slack and they gamble on the next manager, then repeat the process.
The solution is simple and largely inexpensive. ZIFA
should hire a team behind the actual football teams that do all the grunt work
to assemble a high functioning squad that can incarnate Zimbabwe.
Like books, sports give people
a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories.
And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the
athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference,
is the oneness that the mystics talk about. But
you can only be at your best when you do the better work behind the scenes.
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