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HARARE - Calisto Pasuwa is not a good coach. The current crop of Dynamos players does not understand the value that the club represents. Bad away form haunts DeMbare again. Yada yada yada.
The above are some of the reasons offered by football enthusiasts in the country on why Dynamos continue to fail in the African Champions League following yet another disappointing early exit from this year’s competition.
These, of course, are the kind of statements which expose lack of grasp of modern fundamentals of sports – especially when Dynamos are concerned, and I will lay the blame firstly on our so-called football administrators for this error of judgment which has sadly been engraved in the minds of a lot of football fans in this country.
Us journalist should also share part of the blame. For all the exposure afforded by this profession, we have horribly failed to articulate the real issue that affect our clubs on the continent, particularly Dynamos.
The central issue affecting Dynamos in the Champions League is a common Zimbabwean problem, failure to embrace change. Football has changed, and Dynamos are stuck in the past.
While other countries in Africa have adopted the professional means of running football clubs as well as introducing scientific methods of coaching, we have largely remained amateur, still continuing to run clubs and coach players the way it was done 30 years ago.
In this digital age, technological innovations have also changed the way football teams are managed and coached. Anyone who was at the National Sports Stadium to watch the Dynamos-AS Vita first-leg tie few weeks back would have seen the Congolese club’s performance analyst recording footage of the game for technical assessment by the coaches.
The role of the analyst is not just to videotape, but to identify and negotiate the key performance indicators with the coaching staff, and as such, he is a very, very important member in the technical bench of a professional football club.
All the teams that have knocked out Dynamos in the last four years employ all sorts of professionals, well trained to understand the demands of the modern game; fitness & conditioning coaches, psychotherapists, psychologists, masseurs, welfare managers, kit managers – I can go on and on.
You are never gonna compete with opponents exposed to all these professionals.
At most, poor old and ill-equipped Calisto Pasuwa will have two assistant coaches, one a warm-up instructor from merely observing it, and the other a goalkeepers’ coach (yes, the old-school goalkeepers’ coach. What about the defensive coach, or the offensive coach?!).
The big lesson that Dynamos should learned from these last four years of misery is that talent alone is never enough. There is no substitute for professionalism and hard graft.
The “grab-and-smash” method they have used with ruthless effectiveness in winning the domestic league title over the last three seasons only still work here, where their all opponents are equally incapacitated and still doing things the primitive way.
Four to five years ago it could work for Dynamos in Africa because their opponents were perhaps still on the same level with them. But now they have taken giant steps towards professionalism and as they say in street lingo, kwakumberi mberi, and we desperately need to catch on.
