The secret behind Prison Leopards best league run
Football is teamwork and teamwork comes with patience and time. Another important factor is confidence, if there’s no confidence and no trust in one another positive results won’t be reaped.
For a football team to grind good results chemistry must be there. Chemistry in football to put it in simple terms is the best understanding amongst players and technical bench. This chemistry in football doesn’t just come, it is an overtime benefit.
The board or management needs to find the right technical bench to fit in the plans for the team, the technical bench needs to understand and respect the goals for management by repaying the trust it has entrusted in them with good results through making good use of the resources, in this case, are players.
The management needs to listen to the technical bench concerning certain decisions like buying players and letting go of some. The technical bench needs also to understand the abilities of the players at their disposal and work to their potential. Players also need to understand the philosophy of the technical bench and the goals of the team stretching from the board through the technical bench and to players themselves. In-short they all have to live or play to the interest of the other.
You can’t go in the lab to make experiments when you are not sure of the chemicals because you risk explosion, and even if you know the chemicals and how to mix them but if you don’t have the confidence that you will make the right combination then nothing will be done because fear will always work to your disadvantage.
What is happening at Prison Leopards football club is a testimony of what confidence and working to the interest of one another means. It is a trend everywhere especially in Zambia a team that has won promotion to the super league to get rid of almost all players and technical bench with an excuse that the super league requires people with experience who have tested it before.
What the team will do is to bring in new players whom they think will help the team compete in the super league, they will also bring on board the new technical bench and when they do this, the next thing is relegation in most cases from the super league due to poor results.
What people forget is that football is about confidence. You can have the skill and every needed tool in the team but if there’s no confidence in the team, positive results won’t come your way.
A team in football stem from the sponsors who rely on management, technical bench, players, and other staffs like kit masters, etc to achieve set targets, objectives, and desired results.
Prison Leopards after winning promotion to the super league, instead of going on a shopping spree to bring a lot of new players to the team and overhaul the technical bench, did the opposite, they kept everyone they had in the second tier by just making few additions.
For people to understand one another and to have faith which comes with confidence, they need to spend more time with each other. For any scientist to come up with the right solution, time is needed to thoroughly understand the chemicals.
It takes time to implement a philosophy into the team. Prison Leopards is a team which has been together for a long time, they know each other very well. Mwenya Chipepo the Prison Leopards coach has been with the team since the time it was in FAZ/EDEN national league.
They all want to repay each other with confidence entrusted. The coach wants to repay the management for keeping him at the helm, the players want to repay the coach for not getting rid of them. So it is the issue of confidence and serving the interest of the other which is giving Prison Leopards the desired results.
They all understand each other, they all serve the interest of the other, they all have confidence in each other and they all have come up with the right chemistry through mixing understanding, serving the interest of each person, and confidence.
The coach understands the abilities of his players and he knows how to use them because he has been with them for a long time. The players know each other, what to do in each situation, they know their abilities, they know what the coach wants, they understand their coach’s tactics and formations.
This has been replicated in how they are playing, Prison Leopards play as a unit with a stylish playstyle. They defend as a team and attack as a team, no player spends more time with the ball as they quickly pass it to the next player. The build-up play is so neat, very voguish with few touch football. They are a marvel of a team. They don’t have expensive and known players but they look formidable and solid with so much cohesion like a team full of world-class players.
Other teams need to learn from them that football is teamwork and confidence adventure.