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Sports
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Written by Robert Madoi
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Thursday, 19 November 2009 13:56 |
The gut couldn't help but wrench when a high-ranking member on the senior national football team paradoxically tried to qualify why FUFA summoned a certain IbrahimSaddam Juma to the 25-man party that is bracing for a CECAFA Senior Challenge Cup defence.
Juma bejewelled the national under-17 outfit that romped this year's CECAFA Under-17 Championship in the Sudan.
Granted, Juma is a decent footballer. If hyperbole is your kind of thing, you can comfortably state that Juma punches at the same weight with the 24 other footballers national coach Bobby Williamson summoned to The Cranes. But does it sit down well with you when a player makes a rather eye-popping leap from an under-17 side to the senior echelon? Not in my book.
The familiar under-20 and under-23 levels are supposed to be used as learning curves here in Africa to prepare and gradually blood youngsters into the usually arduous senior set-ups. A member of The Cranes' backroom staff also concurs. He says that a leap from under-17 to senior level is, at best, ruinous. But, he shamelessly adds, Juma's case is unique. See, (surprise, surprise) Juma played for the triumphant under-17 outfit when he was well and truly above the tournament's age caveat.
Said the aforesaid member of The Cranes' backroom staff of Juma: "He is about 23 years…So, if he doesn't play for The Cranes now, when will he ever do so?"
Juma's case is the archetypal example of an impairment that has brought African football to its terribly bruised knees - myopic thinking. African football has consequentially warmed up to 'short-termism'. In a gut-wrenching bid to get short-term feats, overage players have been repeatedly used by African outfits at underage tournaments. This - at the sizeable risk of sounding like a scratched record - has dire, if far-reaching consequences as it throws a spanner in the works as far as team building is concerned.
If Juma is indeed 23, then he not only short-changed genuinely under-17 players, who undoubtedly abound in the country, but also gulled the country into thinking that it has something of a youthful spine. So, a decade on when we would expect Juma to be in his prime since his passport will have him aged 27; he will be a 33-year-old tilting to the pensioners' club.
***
Hopefully, budding tennis star, Duncan Mugabe isn't also lying about his age. Mugabe seems like he's been around for donkey's years; but that's because he announced his arrival on the tennis scene as a wide-eyed tweenie. Now at the wrong end of his teen years, Mugabe has the local tennis fraternity eating out of his palms.
Mugabe's astounding form (which has seen him vie for ITF accolades on different African tennis ports of call) won him the Young Achievers Award last weekend. Mugabe shrugged off competition from acclaimed contenders like Proline Soccer Academy's Mujib Kasule to take home the overall award as well as Shs 5m.
The Young Achievers Award will expectedly stand Mugabe in good stead, but he shouldn't be under any illusions. The trail ahead is not an easy one. When most African players relocate to plusher tennis loci in Europe or the Americas, they are saddled with the charge that, yes, theirs is a work in a progress but crucially that they are behind schedule. Mugabe's US-based mate, Patrick Olobo can attest to this.
A dearth of training facilities means that the budding African-based tennis player will always be chasing the shadow of their similitude from Europe or the Americas. Yet with Mugabe serve and volleying his way to success both on and off the courts, the temptation of the youngster resting on his laurels is overwhelming.
Going by his rhetoric at the Young Achievers Awards, Mugabe will thankfully be looking to rest on his laurels not.
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