The actions of Project 2019 Cameroon start to bear fruit

It seems like only yesterday that Fufa announced its Project Cameroon 2019. It came in the aftermath of the disaster that was our Afcon 2015 campaign, and was the result of a candid assessment of our failures then, and what we needed to do to move on and qualify for Nations Cup 2019.
Fast forward and we have just kicked off our Afcon 2019 campaign with a valuable three points away to the top ranked nation in Group L. It is just one of the six games we shall play between now and September 2018, hardly an indication to pull out the band and flowers.
But it was a valuable win away and something we are starting to make routine, seeing we have collected 10 points from our last five away games. Not bad for a team that until recently suffered from acute travel-sickness. The thing though is how did we find ourselves in such a lofty position?
It helps that we are still riding the wave of Afcon 2017 and Sserunkuma’s goal was the archetypical poachers goal. But it’s about time we disassociated our good form, from good luck.
I reckon it is the culmination of at least, most of the things we knew we could, and said we should do to get us higher up in the African football food chain.
Over the last 2 -3 years we could have resorted to form and parceled out blame for all our errors, and they were and still are many, without suggesting solutions.
But we chose to instead focus on improving in the areas of relationships with local corporate sponsors and footballs’ top governing bodies as well as cleaning up the litter of local football politics.

We have also made decent progress in matters of player welfare and coaching.
In coaching for instance, we now have 260 qualified coaches across the country, up from 26. And that includes fitness trainers, goal keeping and youth coaches. To improve competencies, classes to move from CAF C to B Level, are either planned or underway. Subsequently all these will be collected under a professional coaches’ association, as the top most technical body in whose joint custody the development of the game shall lie.

This may sound like run of mill interventions, but one doesn’t have to search far and wide to find their true value. Across the border in Kenya our methods are being referenced. It isn’t an accident either that the last two league championship in Kenya have been won by Ugandan coaches or that we are represented on the continent at club level. So, the good run we see all around, is all those small incremental steps, starting to bear fruit.
Complacency though, can be a sterner opponent to overcome, and no doubt Tanzania and Lesotho lay in ambush. But, we should applaud ourselves for being in a position were qualification will be guaranteed by winning all our home games. Not even the noble intentions of the architects of Project Cameroon 2019 could have envisioned this.

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MBanturaki