So, the Sportpesa Allstars team is back in the tropics after a week sojourn in cold England, taking lots of positives, at least as far as the returning party is concerned.
As the smoke clears after all the ruckus caused by the ever discerning Kenyan public, its time to take stock and dissect the tour from all perpectives. It is crunch time.
MARKETING vis-a-vis DEVELOPMENT
The future of African football is currently converged in Zambia, at the CAF U20 Nations Cup.
These boys, nay young men strutting their stuff in the junior championship will form the core of their respective national teams for years to come.
Any serious nation worth its salt knows the future of the sport cannot be built on quicksand, but on youth and functional structures.
When therefore Kenya Premier League title sponsors Sportpesa in conjunction with Premier League side Hull City announced plans to select a local Allstars side to face the development team of the side from England, the country felt our football was finally getting back on track after years of doom and gloom.
The finer details of the selection process were never laid bare, but top coaches from Hull were ironically tasked with making the major decisions as far as the final squad was concerned.
Granted, Sportpesa as a company holds every right to give leeway to potential partners in doing their marketing, but it defies logic for foreign tacticians to make choices for the Kenya team, then hand over responsibilities to the locals to complete the equation.
True, the game needs foreign expertise to grow, but that can only happen when home based coaches are empowered and given a free reign to pick and manage their teams.
In essence, Hull City guys trooped into town and picked a team for Kenya to face them back in England.
When the Allstars eventually landed on the banks of the Thames and filed out to face their opponents, the team was largely made up of players considered over the hill, a far cry from expectations of the whole country that preferred a youthful side as part of our restructuring process.
The team gave a good account of themselves even as they went on to lose to boys some half the age of the Kenya veterans, but public opinion heavily suggested the tour was a wasted opportunity for the nation to finally get its act together.
With the country still toying with the idea of hosting CHAN -African Championships in early 2018, this was perhaps the best starting point to assemble the best U23s on offer to form the bedrock of Kenyan football going forward.
We need every support we can get in developing the game, but marketing interests must not override our bigger ambition and focus.
In the end we were armtwisted and fell for a marketing ploy disguised as Kenyan football development.
GRAVY TRAIN
What put the icing on the sour cake was the number of the travelling contigent. Instead of giving more places to young upcoming talents to get a feel of the pro culture, tour organisers gave a massive thirty slots to journalists for the quick European sortie.
The role of all these scribes is anybody’s guess, but its about time someone took the serious lead in shaping the football destiny of this country.
Nobody appears to have a mangle grip on the game this part of the world.
At this rate, we will sing the youth song for years on end, but achieve only stop gap progress, if any.
It is like waiting for the proverbial godot.
