As Zambia close in to the promised land…….
There was an unfortunate incident that occurred at the match venue on Wednesday evening. Teargas canisters were released outside the stadium to a rather unruly crowd outside the stadium.
Sadly the gassing did escalate right into the airs of stadium and return affected everyone in the stadium including both sets of players on the pitch. It led to a stoppage of about six minutes.
It’s a sad epitome to a rather major incident free tournament upto that moment.
Exemplary show of sportsmanship by the Amajita of South Africa in joining the Chipoloplo youngsters in that heartwarming prayer after the match. They deserve great praise. They could have passively decided to play the blame game in relation to the tear gasses and walked away in protest. But not kudos those kids.
The incidence was a sum total of a lot things. Doomsayers would love to straightaway ran to blame the police. I would say completely no. Those men and women in uniform are human beings and consciously so. Probably some of had spouses, brothers, sisters, parents, children and friends in the stadium. Who they could have actually bought tickets for watch the match. To come and call them overzealous or anything like is a publicist stunt of studity. There should be no apportionment of the blame but let us learn from that.
Zambia is not a familiar destination for major events like this. Apart from political rallies our country is not well experienced to handle these events. Its the more times we can host these tournaments can then we realise how best we can minimise what happened last night. I used the term minimised. We can never completely be secure.
Its no wonder CAF is reluctant to offer the hosting of these tournaments to upstarts. We start from smaller tournaments. Given the scenario am sure next time we bid to host Afcon senior we are going to cite this junior tournament as an experience. We stand a good chance.
Once the final statistics are released we may come to realise that Zambia rank amongst those countries that have attracted massive crowds especially on matches involving the host team for an under 20 tournament.
At this level of tournament, U20. Am sure both Fifa and CAF were not expecting the numbers to be exceeding 50 000. If anything its a tournament that would have been comfortable being hosted at Nkoloma Stadium or Nkonkola Stadium on paper atleast.
Taking it to Levy Mwanawasa or National Heroes Stadiums was based on the international viewership. For numbers, estimations would be at these much much smaller stadium.
History will show that biggest non political gatherings Zambia has ever had apart from Zambia senior national team playing might just be the burial of the Gabon crash heroes and Popes visit years ago.
These were sombre events and you hadly expect crowd trouble. Apart from these the Commonwealth summit and AU/OAU summit brought in a host of presidents. Security for these functions is well documented as top notch and any case you hadly see numbers in excessive 20 000 ordinary citizens attending.
Therefore preparedness as a country was not top notch in many fronts, policing, marketing, organisation etc.
1. Police, the expectations by police was surely not as seen. And we can’t expect police to deploy more members at short notice leaving other places poorly policed. We ought to acknowledge that police need a long time to plan for security measures.
The 50 000 plus troo capacity crowds trooping to National Heroes Stadium was probably never ever anticipated. It could have been mentioned but I can bet everyone was saying it in passing.
2. Marketing the organisers did not sell these events very passionately as they probably thought it was a waste of resources. Thinking who would come to watch Zambia junior in excess of 20-25 000s.
But the Zambian family have been deprived of these major events for years and this was a chance of a lifetime.
3. Organisation of outside events like fan parks. Giant screens could have been erected even outside the Heroes Stadium and in residential places. But again nobody seriously considered these huge numbers.
Its no wonder even the national broadcaster was reluctant to screen the matches live. Fearing they may not get advertisers. It took government intervention to sort that out.
Those and many other items could be brought into the equation.
