Micho stands on the doorstep of greatness

Local coaches should be able to pick up the baton from Micho whenever he calls it a day. File photo

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MAKING OF A HERO. Next Sunday when he leads our boys against Comoros at Namboole, he will be 90 minutes away from ending a 40-year qualification wait.

It is only three years, but it seems like a long time ago that a concise brief spelling out the need to manage Cranes and develop youth structures was shoved under Milutin ‘Micho’ Sredojevich’s armpit as he was paraded to replace Cecafa King, Robert ‘Bobby’ Williamson.

It was not a complicated brief for a man of Micho’s demonstrated competence. Here was a man with four consecutive leagues titles and one Cecafa in his stint at SC Villa from 2001-2004. But he had not inherited an impoverished Villa. What really stood out is, he had achieved with good football and a healthy reliance on youth.

And even when he left for St. George, Yanga, El Hilal and Orlando Pirates, he was never far from Uganda, opening many doors to professional football for our boys.

So we signed him as our own and gave him an appealing, but rather inexperienced duo of local deputies in Sam Timbe, Kefa Kisala and Fred Kajoba.

Where most foreigners would have shouted interference or preferred to hand pick their own deputies, Micho did not see a problem because he was a ‘local’ in many ways. He understood local football politics and had a not so shabby resume. He was always the convenient choice who could not be any worse than Williamson. But club football was where he had built his reputation. National team football as he did realize with Rwanda’s Amavubi Stars is a completely different animal, all together.

He was to crush into a wall of skewed expectations, conditioned by years of near success and persistent failure.

Micho like all those before him had to contend with ‘political’ interference from careerists and football administrators – who almost always form a weed that grows into national team matters and one that always succeeds in choking the efforts of team managers. But he got on with his job.

He, as expected, oversaw yet another botched Afcon 2015 campaign and, also as expected, won Cecafa 2015 with a very youthful side, I must add. In between that, he did put up a decent show at Chan.

Now, however, he stands on the cusp of real greatness. Next Sunday when he leads our boys against Comoros at Namboole, he will be 90 minutes away from ending a 40-year qualification wait. Should he succeed, his reputation will be cast in stone in the mind of many Ugandans.

It will not be because he has not had to contend with the problems that bedeviled his predecessors. He has just managed to circumnavigate them better.

And to be fair to Fufa, the whole Cranes football thing has been run much better these last three years. It must be said they wanted this to work as is evident in the speed with which they got Micho signed – five weeks. It seems the meddling that rendered men like Bobby redundant, and turned him into a highly paid bar-hopper are at a minimum. And these things eventually pay off. Here is to hoping that happens next Sunday. Good luck, Micho.