Opinion: Knives Are Out To Get Kamanga After Chipolopolo Failure
So the knives are out for one Andrew Ndanga Kamanga in the wake of Zambia’s 3-2 defeat to Guinea Bissau on Saturday essentially knocking out the Chipolopolo from the 2017 Africa Cup.
Critics laid the blame on Kamanga with well-known voices coming out of the woods months after the change of administration at Football House.
Kamanga took over the reins of power with barely five days before back to back Africa Cup qualifiers against Guinea Bissau at home and Congo Brazzaville away with both games ending in 1-all draws.
By the time Kamanga was coming into office Zambia’s only win in the campaign had been against Kenya away with qualification to the World Cup Group stage qualifiers for the African zone keeping the Chipolopolo face up.
So what could Kamanga have possibly done to have righted the slide of the Chipolopolo? Everything remained fundamentally the same with the same head coach whose request for assistants of his choice was granted roping in Aggrey Chiyangi and Elijah Chikwanda.
On his part Kamanga who was in the middle of a turbulence to appoint a general secretary managed to put up two international friendly matches against Togo and Gambia prior to the Guinea Bissau outing which the team drew.
A lot has been said about having routinely qualified to the Africa Cup with the dent of 2004 when under Patrick Phiri we missed out.
But what did we ever have to show for qualifying at the 1998, 2000 and 2002 including 2006 under Kalusha Bwalya that we were booted out in the first round. Teams qualified despite being ill prepared to compete at the tournament.
Maybe this failure will provide an opportunity for Kamanga and team to provide a more thought out starting point like looking for an expatriate coach since our local experiments have clearly come short after Honour Janza and now George Lwandamina. Maybe that business acumen Kamanga is so famed with can now help lobby for an expatriate coach.
This should also bring an opportunity to better our selection process for the team members. Otherwise crying about officiating when we did not win our earlier matches especially those at home will not get us anywhere.
Our campaign was long lost at the Levy Mwanawasa Stadium where in this campaign we are winless. Besides people should also get over the fact that there was a change at Football House democratically spearheaded by councillors. No matter how much anyone will cry about who was there before people should accept that a new era has dawned.
For now maybe there could be recourse in the World Cup qualifiers but not before we put certain fundamentals in place provided by the opportunity of failure.
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