Ian Gorowa not stepping down

By Eddie Chikamhi

Zimbabwe Warriors coach Ian Gorowa is not stepping down and says the team’s disastrous elimination by Tanzania at the first hurdle of the 2015 Nations Cup finals is a reflection of the deep crisis that has gripped Zimbabwean football.

It marked the fourth campaign, in either the World Cup or the Nations Cup, which the Warriors have taken part in, since zifa president Cuthbert Dube became the leader of the association, with the senior national team failing on each occasion.

The Warriors are just coming from their worst World Cup campaign, where they failed to win even one of their six matches and finished bottom of the group, and now they have matched their worst World Cup campaign.

Gorowa is the sixth coach to be used by Dube, in the past four years, but the Warriors have failed in each campaign while protests in their camp over bonuses and allowances, which usually come on the eve of the big matches, have become a common feature.

The Warriors are now out of international football, for at least two years, and the bleak situation is being compounded by the fact that the Young Warriors are also out of international football as they are serving a three-year ban after the Under-20s and Under-17s failed to fulfil their African Youth Cup fixtures.

Gorowa said he was devastated and considered quitting the national team after Sunday’s game, but would not let emotions get the better of him.

He apologised to the nation, on behalf of his players, in the wake of their failed campaign.

“That was not a good result at all and for that I would like to apologise to the nation. I also want to apologise to the journalists for not turning up for the Press conference,” Gorowa told The Herald.

“I am sure you would understand how I felt after that match. I am really sorry about that, I think the emotions were still high then.

“I am sure the players were also hurt and I am apologising on their behalf. The country has endured a lot of hardships in terms of getting results over the years.

“We are not developing and let’s face it, we are in a national crisis in terms of football. It is after falling to a country like Tanzania when we have to accept as a nation whether we are good enough to compete.

“I also think that it was a blessing in disguise to know where we stand as a footballing nation. We cannot continue fooling ourselves, there is a crisis. It’s indeed a national crisis when our team crashes out of the afcon at the preliminary stage.

“We need to sit down, not only with zifa but with all stakeholders, to see how best we can come out of this crisis. We learnt the hard way but we have to take a stance to rebuild the national game.”

Gorowa paid dearly for investing so much trust in the group of players that did duty at the recent CHAN tournament in South Africa.

“As a coach you take time to reflect and see if you had selected the right players and whether you put them in the correct positions. But I believed in the team,” said Gorowa.

“It’s difficult to pinpoint what went wrong. I wouldn’t want to lay the blame on my players although we did stress the whole week the importance of winning that match.

“The easiest thing for me was to walk away after that result but I am Zimbabwean first of all and I love my country. I admit we are in time of crisis. I thought about quitting and I realised it was not good to make a decision when emotions are high.”

Gorowa also felt Tanzania deserved to win more than his side because the Taifa Stars were taking football seriously and had prepared thoroughly.

“With due respect Tanzania had done their preparations well. Those guys came here and they fought with a great spirit to get that draw,” said Gorowa.

“We also have to factor in that God is a faithful rewarder of people, according to how much work they put into something. They have been in camp for two months and they played a couple of friendly matches yet on our side we met five days before the match, and played Dynamos in a friendly, and somewhere along the way players went on strike. I am not saying, it’s that protest that disturbed us, no.

“There is definitely no excuse. Everybody who was involved, we were all wrong. We all failed the nation but after failure we have to look in the mirror and find ways to move forward.”

Zimbabwe National Soccer Supporters Association official Eddie Chivero, said the Warriors’ failure on Sunday was a disaster that has been in the pipeline for some time.

“It’s the worst moment in our football because this failure happened right in our home and it was painful to watch but when you look at the two camps you can see that Tanzania had invested in preparing for this match and we hadn’t,” said Chivero.

“Even after they beat us in the first leg they still decided to play a friendly international against Malawi who were on their way to Chad and that shows how serious these guys were while we were only playing our local champions, minus their best players, and losing that practice match.

“You reap what you sow and we didn’t take Tanzania seriously while our rivals prepared as if they were playing Brazil and they were rewarded for that while we prepared as if we were going to play an exhibition match.

“We spent a month in camp preparing for CHAN but we wanted just a few days to prepare for the Nations Cup and that is where I hold zifa culpable and the best thing that the association leader, Cuthbert Dube, should do now is to give football a chance by stepping aside.

“You can be the best chief executive but if the company is not performing you have to step aside and when you consider that we have fared dismally in all our four campaigns in afcon and the World Cup, and we have these two years without international football coming, you can see that we need someone else at the very top of the game.”

Chivero said while the coach might have got a number of his decisions wrong, the Warriors should still have been good enough to win if they had prepared accordingly and had remained focussed on this big match.

“I think as fans we can only look to our leaders to deliver but every time when we have big assignments we have these issues about money coming up because people at zifa chose not to address the issues at the right time and it’s very disruptive,” said Chivero.

“In that team that played on Sunday, we had a number of players who were at CHAN and these are the same boys who have been crying that they were given a raw deal when zifa suddenly decided to change goal posts and disregard the agreement they had gone into with the players.

“When you don’t address such issues you are brewing trouble and we have no one but our football leaders to blame for the mess we find ourselves in and I think we have to dissolve the association and accept the consequences that will come with that.” The Herald