AfricaPress-Tanzania: BY the time you read this piece, you would have already known the outcome of the Simba, AS Vita match which had not yet been played by the time I was penning this piece in the morning yesterday.
And by the time you read my piece, you would have already made up your mind, if you’re one of those die-hard Simba fans or one of the club’s arch soccer rivals whether Tanzanians need to keep their hopes on the Msimbazi Street club.
I’m saying that because Tanzanian soccer fans are very funny breed of fans, who believe on what their hearts tells them rather than what really exist on the ground.
They believe on the strength of a recruited local or foreign player on the basis of a player’s status and nothing else! But what is perhaps worse, they don’t (including their own players) believe in hard work on the field.
We therefore lose competitive matches not because we don’t have good players, but because our players don’t work hard enough both in practice and during their respective matches.
In fact, nothing testifies what I have just asserted above more than the just ended CHAN soccer tournament which was hosted by Cameroon and in which Taifa Stars were in the same group with Guinea Conakry, Zambia and Namibia.
If you had the opportunity of watching all matches, and especially so, those in which Taifa Stars played against Guinea and Zambia you would note that there was really nothing that Zambia and Guinea players had which our players did not have.
If it was ball possession, Tanzania had better than both teams. But our players’ collective game command could rightly be described as ball possession without progression and I had occasion to note the need on our technical bench to work on the players’ collective progression as ball possession without scoring goals is meaningless.
The same thing could be said about our players’ collective ball skills. They were just as good as those from Guinea and Zambia. But Taifa Stars lacked one thing that most African soccer teams have, drive which is commanded by one’s attitude.
I have always asked myself, why do our players lack the drive and self-belief which is extremely important in winning matches? If you asked me why we could not go beyond the preliminary round, my answer is very simple, we lacked the drive and self-belief.
Now drive and self-belief is partly earned by constant practice against better and stronger teams, especially from outside Tanzania. We all know, both clubs managements and the TFF don’t seem to believe in this and that is why we are partly where we are today.
But what about personal motivation to perform in a way that foreign talent scouts would notice my exceptional soccer talent? We saw tons of these among Guinean and Zambian players.
But not between and among our players! If you don’t understand what I’m driving to, then I invite you to watch the following Tanzanian soccer players when they are in action, namely, Simon Msuva, Thomas Ulimwengu and of course, Himid Mao and Mbwana Samatta and that is why they are where they are today.
The foregoing players have drive and self-belief. Now you need to have a team in which the entire squad is heavily armed in drive and self-belief.
It is this same problem which once drove Kenya’s Victor Wanyama to wonder why the number of Tanzanian soccer players in Europe was low when they had amazing soccer talent. You now know, for the answer is very simple.
They lack the all-important drive and self-belief and not talent and skills. Talent and massive amount of skills is what Victor Wanyama had noticed on Tanzanian soccer players when his team, Harambee Stars were playing against their Tanzanian counterparts, Taifa Stars in a friendly match which ended in a goalless draw.
And it was after the end of the match that forced Wanyama to ask what he asked. If you want to understand how weak our players are when it comes to drive and self-belief, then flashback your mind to the match in which Taifa Stars lost the initiative to Guinean players after fighting from a goal down to lead by 2-1.
If the Zambian team, Chipolopolo had done what Taifa Stars had done to Guinea on that night, the latter would not have managed to equalize. After scoring the winning goal against Guinea, our players lacked the adrenalin to put everything into attack; they lacked the all-important drive and self-belief and that was best demonstrated with the way they tried to protect their one goal lead.
They defended, clumsily. Had Guinea failed to equalize on that day, Taifa Stars would have strode into the last sixteen.
But they failed to seize the golden opportunity with both hands, hence allowing the west Africans to get instead into the last sixteen.
