At the time of writing this, Uganda was due to play Morocco in the on-going Africa Nations Championship, a tournament for local-based players.
My prayer is that The Cranes win to qualify for the knockout stage but that would not be a ground of progress if the performances of the first two games against Rwanda and Togo are anything to go by. Those games represent a chronic Ugandan syndrome of doing the same mistakes and expect different results.
Firstly, the quality of our players is lacking. This is so because domestic football is dead at the moment. This death has been occasioned by Fufa’s overbearing approach to control all stakeholders such as referees and administrators. Ronnie Kalema, the head of referees sits on the Fufa executive which has been found to ignore match-fixing among referees.
It is an open secret many games in the league are fixed and even summoning of players to the national team is dependent on loyalty to the cabal that controls the sport.
Then you have a Uganda Premier League board without any representation from club owners. What we have ended up with is a league of averages and the best clubs cannot even cross the first hurdle of continental football.
The list of Ugandan football ills is so long it will require a complete overhaul to stabilise.
Therefore, regardless of whether The Cranes overcome Morocco, it will simply be a case of putting icing sugar on a rotten cake.
Let’s face it; what business do ageing over-the-hill players have to do with the Chan team? They are suffocating the careers of top young players because Fufa’s mentality is to win at all costs. Why does it have to be the senior Cranes coach to handle the Chan team when we have several local coaches that need international exposure? This is stagnating our local coaches.
In Uganda is were you find an executive FUFA member calling and coercing a players of a named club to under perform in order for the team to lose for the benifits of political games and you expect such a local league have skilled and Displined players, that's the rotten morality reflected at CHAN. Ask your neighbour why we don't have 50% local players at the senior cranes if it's not by design to kill local league.
The most annoying thing is that Fufa does not take lessons from such situations, instead they use it to fan intrigue amongst stakeholders as they look for a scapegoat.
Expect half the squad to be fired before another group of recycled players emerge.
