What Uganda’s ailing football must do to get its groove back
The night game between Cranes and Guinea was evidence that fans in the country love the game. Photo by E. Chicco
What you need to know:
Products play second fiddle to brands because the latter has a soul, spirit of individuality and palpable athleticism about it that puts it on a pedestal.
A blare of car horns permeates the atmosphere after one of the drivers momentarily hesitates to drive into a tiny space that seconds ago was left vacant.
It’s 6:50pm, and impatience has occupied a disproportionate place in the psyche of a bevy of gridlocked drivers who have their eyes set on Mandela National Stadium that deceptively grasps out at them. The national football team, The Cranes, kicks off the second of its 2015 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) qualifying matches against Guinea in forty minutes, and — clearly — the bumper-to-bumper isn’t helping matters.
The aggrieved people should have known better…or should they!
Cranes matches are no stranger to clogged roads, the blurred distinctions of day and night notwithstanding.
Their magnetism had, however, attracted a big question mark after fans shunned home encounters against Madagascar and Mauritania because of the princely sum appended to tickets.
The night match against Guinea was expected to be engulfed in a chasm of despair, with pockets of empty seats punctuating the 40,000-seater stadium. It instead turned out to be a startling antithesis. A cacophony of deafening vuvuzelas to go with the sizeable crowd made for an electric atmosphere.
Night matches at the Mandela National Stadium have been held before. Your columnist recalls watching Simeon Masaba and Geoffrey Serunkuma score in an entertaining 2-2 draw against Burkina Faso during a 2006 World Cup qualifier back in 2005. A sizeable crowd also attended that match.
Add the capacity crowd that watched on tenterhooks as Police edged SC Villa in the 2005 league final at the same venue to the same equation, and you can’t help but come to a realisation that night matches may well be a magnet for Ugandan football fans. It’s certainly something worth exploring.
The veneer of optimism is, however, cracked, by the fact that we tend to treat football as a product as opposed to brand here in Uganda. We are oblivious to the distinction be-tween a product and brand. That distinction shouldn’t be lost on us, dear reader, be-cause whilst products are made in a factory; brands are made — created if you will — in the mind. A brand is as formidable as it is potent because it blurs the line between the inorganic and organic.
Put another way, a brand gives life to an inanimate product.
This delicate New Age formula of biologising products is a best practice that has been used to set juggernauts like the English Premier League in motion. Football is treated like an industry that sets out to churn an iconography of pop culture whose main goal is to make profit.
Products play second fiddle to brands because the latter has a soul, spirit of individuality and palpable athleticism about it that puts it on a pedestal.
Your favourite Premier League club makes you cry, smile and dance — depending on the result it gleans — because it’s a brand; not a product. It has a soul and spirit of individuality that resonates with you.
Ugandan football as such has to ensure that it moulds the figure of a brand. All that it needs to do is establish its equities and build on them. Market research has to be un-dertaken to establish what stands it in good stead — is it having floodlit matches during a weekday or on the weekend? We need to biologise our football and give it an individ-uality that will have a rich resonance with all those fans who were gridlocked in the run-up to The Cranes’ 2-0 win over Guinea.
There is work to be done for the Cricket Cranes ahead of global event
A top three finish at the Africa Cricket Association Cup, which came to a full stop in the South African township of Benoni last weekend, must be a bittersweet pill for Uganda. While this was by no means a breezy performance by the Cricket Cranes, it being con-strued in some quarters as the very embodiment of mediocrity is a bit harsh.
That said; while some might find the latter assessment too harsh and drying, it’s worth noting that — bar Roger Mukasa’s purple patch (he rolled off consecutive half centuries in three innings) and Henry Senyondo’s wicket-taking exploits (spinners are not supposed to sparkle in merriment on South Africa’s bouncy pitches) — nothing spectacular saw the light of day.
True, there was a commanding win over South Africa and a thrilling run chase, which culminated in a one-wicket win over Zimbabwe, but those were, in all honesty, ‘emerging’ outfits. No rabbit was pulled out of a hat during those victories. If anything, just like the duel against Tanzania, it was business as usual when the Cricket Cranes took on South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Huge defeats
Business wasn’t booming, though, when the Cricket Cranes crossed paths with Kenya and Namibia. Lopsided defeats at the hands of Africa’s number one (Kenya) and two (Namibia) sides in the ICC World Cricket League (WCL) showed that there is work to be done.
Both Kenya and Namibia are in WCL Division II, an echelon that the Cricket Cranes have unsuccessfully tried to gatecrash on a number of occasions.
Uganda has been stuck in the rut that is WCL Division III despite sustained successes that saw it win the third tier title in 2007 and place second in 2009 and 2013. They will host the fifth edition of the tournament between 26 October and 2 November. Half a dozen countries will feature in the tournament, with the top two finishers earning promotion to WCL Division II.
Doubtless the Cricket Cranes will fancy their chances given their impeccable track rec-ord in Division III. That’s not to say that Division III is littered with spring chickens. The likes of Nepal would frown at such a presumption. Uganda, though, should have just enough in the tank to place in the top two echelons.
Losses to Kenya and Namibia in the Africa Cricket Association Cup have nonetheless showed that Cricket Cranes will find it terribly difficult to punch above their weight if they make the Division II grade. They have to burn the midnight oil to ensure that they don’t turn out to be the proverbial rabbit in the headlights.
What we now know....
We know that…oops they did it, again! They in this case connoting the national netball team, the She Cranes, and the Government of Uganda. We know that the She Cranes bossed the Africa qualifying leg of the Netball World Cup in Gaborone, Swaziland.
We also know that the mathematics became much simpler for the She Cranes after a string of withdrawals turned the qualifier into a round robin competition.
Zimbabwe (43-42), Zambia (52-45), Botswana (47-32), Swaziland (51-38) and Namibia (66-24) were no match for the She Cranes who effortlessly finished in the top two echelons of the qualifier, and with it made the grade for next year’s Netball World Cup in Sydney, Australia.
We nevertheless know that this wasn’t walk in the park for the She Cranes. When their netball forebears qualified for the 1979 Netball World Cup they didn’t have to beat as many odds especially since Idi Amin’s government can be blamed for many wrongs but not for giving sport a tattered cushion.
Tales of the She Cranes being cash-strapped have been commonplace in the modern-day. Will the team’s recent momentous feat put paid the raw deal it gets? That, we don’t know for sure.
