A tale of two coaches and the enemy within

Too close to call is a term that is often thrown around carelessly, but this has hardly been the case with this season’s Uganda Premier League. The race down the home straight is, for all intents and purposes, as tight as a miser’s purse at both ends of the log.

While such perceived competitiveness continues to be a main source of optimism, it has also triggered fissures. We got to witness these fissures in all their crippling affliction a few days back. Two coaches — one toiling to beat the drop; the other help his boyhood club win a first league title since 2004 — were ordered before disciplinary panels after snarling a few choice remarks.

Actually for Paul Mukatabala, the SC Villa assistant coach, it was not a snarl as much as a missive that went viral on Facebook. Posted hours after the Jogoos were stunned 1-0 by UPDF, the missive was essentially a tirade of abuse directed at Villa head coach, Wasswa Bbosa. Mukatabala accused Bbosa of lacking in all mannerisms. Bbosa had greeted the surprise defeat at the hands of UPDF with an equally surprising claim that the result had been predetermined — that the marginal defeat in Bombo was tailored by Mukatabala to make his position at Villa Park untenable.

Mukatabala’s response was just as unsettling. Drawing on sheer muscular flair, the Villa assistant coach accused his superior of “feeling insecure…lacking in self respect and character.”
If Bbosa had intended to get under his junior’s skin, he succeeded spectacularly. The calm, cool and collected demeanour that has served Mukatabala so well over the years was swiftly replaced with a deeply disturbing retributive streak.
Villa has since sent Mukatabala on gardening leave pending an inquest the club hopes to exhaust in a fortnight. The sorry episode has nevertheless managed to explore the unhealed wound at the heart of Ugandan football. The sport continues to wallow in a culture of intrigue and pettiness. As the Villa case shows, the enemy is often from within. This is neither helpful nor healthy.

I will tell you what else is neither helpful nor healthy — the refereeing. Yet after striking a pessimistic tone about Deogratias Opio’s performance with the whistle during Proline’s 3-1 defeat by Vipers, Fufa’s Competitions Disciplinary Panel was quick to summon Mujib Kasule.

The Proline coach was deemed to have acted out of the contours of the Fufa competitions rules 2017/18 — specifically articles 30.1 (ii) and 30.2. The articles may effectively gag coaches (which is unhealthy in your columnist’s book), but they sure as hell don’t mask the fact that referees have been out of their depth this season.
Support for the men in black has been noticeably lower amongst coaches plying their trade in the topflight. None of them has been as vocal as Kasule. The Proline coach’s anecdotal evidence has had such an overpowering force. So overpowering that former Fifa referee Ali Waiswa was on the same page with him when they both recently appeared on NTV’s premier sports talk show, The Press Box.

Waiswa described with such pitiless efficiency how Ugandan referees receive bribes via Mobile Money to manipulate results of matches. Further proof of a refereeing crisis in the Ugandan backdrop can be found in the recent instituting of a disciplinary panel that among others includes retired Fifa assistant referee, Ali Tomusange.
One of the members on the panel, Jamil Ssewanyana, told this paper that their ambit is to “awaken the referees and bring back sanity and confidence.” It is the wish of this column that Ssewanyana and company succeed. The effects of a refereeing scandal can be quite brutal. Uganda looked fixedly at one back in 2003 and has never recovered its mojo.