Cranes should beat Botswana
Captain Geoffrey Massa (C) was a thorn in the flesh of Botswana with a goal as Uganda won 2-0 in the first leg at Namboole Stadium last year. PHOTO BY EDDIE CHICCO
What you need to know:
PREPARED. Cranes travelled one week ahead of schedule not only to acclimatise but also engaged Zimbabwe in a friendly that helped Micho do his homework.
Today we are in Francistown taking on Botswana in the 2017 Afrcia Cup of Nations (Afcon) Qualifiers. We are tied on seven points with group leaders Burkina Faso, but a worse head-to-head means we have to win the game to stand a chance of getting back into in the driving seat.
You could say here we go again, us and our calculators that come out as soon as we get to the business end of any campaign.
The truth though is this time round, we fall more on the side of preparation and not one where we hope lady luck, weighed down by the guilt of abandoning us in recent times, will smile.
There was a time in our not so distant past when the final week of the game was one in which we would still be chasing after loan sharks for funds.
Not now let us be honest. We have travelled one week ahead of schedule not only to acclimatise, but have also engaged Zimbabwe in a friendly that served to remind us of the gaps that still need to be plugged.
Something else to observe is that even if we are not to assemble a loose collection of free agents and bench-warmers with friends at Mengo, it has not been the case for a while now. One could say it is because the national team ‘selects itself’ these days, but that is as a result of building around a main core of veterans like goalkeeper Denis Onyango, left-back Godfrey Walusimbi, central defender Isaac Isinde, midfielder Tony Mawejje and striker Geoffrey Massa.
And on the logistical side of things, it helps that the connections to Southern Africa are not as bad as those to West Africa. Neither does Francistown have the humidity of say Accra.
But still we travelled in advance if only to spend a couple of days acclimatising in neighboring Zimbabwe.
So, it is not for us anymore to stumble upon a country with strange food and stranger weather. We are sending advance parties to sieve through hotels, training grounds, and to send back reports on local weather.
Botswana is not Canada, but the She-Cranes or anyone who has experienced the mid-year Southern winter will tell you the weather can be very punishing to an unprepared lad from sunny Kampala.
It all sounds trivial, does it not? But it is on such small matters that games turn. The thing is that you cannot play a decent game of football if you are not in the right frame of mind.
And being in the right frame means that matters of basic comfort are catered for as much as the physiological issues of actually playing and winning a football game.
On current evidence therefore we seem to have made that step onto a place where we are now taking full responsibility for our preparations.
And this is what we should have done all along because whatever we did in the past has not worked for 39 years!
Does this guarantee results? Most of the time yes, and I do not see why we cannot beat Botswana.
