Cecafa U15: The future is bright

With hindsight it was good to host this tournament in Asmara, far away from the cynical crowd of Kampala and its obsession with European football and their suspicions about all our underage teams.

The inaugural Cecafa U15 tournament has for the last two weeks raged on in Eretria. It hasn’t showed up on many radars and information has been hard to gather from mainstream media channels. But still it has been pleasing to note that our boys have done a lot to demonstrate that our domination of this region will continue for the foreseeable future.

With hindsight it was good to host this tournament in Asmara, far away from the cynical crowd of Kampala and its obsession with European football and their suspicions about all our underage teams. That, it appears, unshackled the boys. But still we must ask, who are these boys and where did they come from?

We know they are coached by Jackson Magera, the highly regarded KCCA youth coach. So, did he pick all of them from the KCCA academy or has a national youth development structure been taking shape behind the scenes all these years?

Judging from the make-up of the team neither question can be answered conclusively. The bulk of the team is drawn from schools like Kawempe SS, Kibuli SS Budo SS- all within proximity of Kampala. Not only is this way too convenient, it also has the potential to turn a national venture into a regional one.

We should instead aspire to spreading the selection net countrywide. Talent exists outside Kampala. We just haven’t found it. That is how a national youth development structure ought to be and once was.

In the 60s and 70s a golden era for Ugandan sports, regional champions came together perennially to decide the nations next stars. The entire nation fed the talent funnel and as a consequence produced bigger stars than is logically possible, if we only used Kampala as a catchment area.

Still, I am happy to acknowledge that it all must start somewhere. If the objective of the U15 is to catch them young and coach them to eventually feed the Cranes, then pointing out its weaknesses should never be mistaken for ridicule.

At least we can now say that we are putting Fifa youth development funds to good use and reaping big from the foresight of many top-flight clubs and private academies, for whom youth development is no longer a matter of flowery promises and little action. Improvements in approach can always be made thereafter.

Lest we forget, there was a time when the development of the game heavily relied on the determinism and benevolence of individuals. As such the game moved in tandem with their level of interest or fortunes. This is not what I see here.
So regardless of what went down in Friday’s final or the composition of that team, we should cheer for much more than just the football abilities of these young men.

Let us celebrate this, the first step on the single plank thrown upon the chasm between those who think we can drift along randomly and those who are ready to act upon the fact that everything worthwhile comes at the end of intention.