Lessons to pick from Wasswa’s highs, lows

No player in the current Cranes setup splits opinion as Hassan Wasswa does.
Revered and reviled in almost equal measure, it feels like the the thirty-something utility player has been a mainstay with the senior men’s national football team as long as the Pope was an altar boy.

Such is Wasswa’s longevity that having a Cranes starting XI without him feels a little like starting a kids’ birthday party with the broccoli course.

Stade du 4 Août, where the Cranes started their 2021 Afcon qualifying campaign with a gusty draw against Burkina Faso’s Stallions, is hardly a candy store.

Many a visiting team have had a broccoli course shoved down their throats. It’s the kind of cauldron where Wasswa always thrives. The utility player sees himself and is seen by others as a product of hard work.

The grafter pejorative notwithstanding, this journeyman of a player is someone you would rather have on your side than against you.
Despite his often times unsightly take-no-prisoners approach, or in fact because of it, Wasswa has firmly been in the plans of Cranes coach after Cranes coach.

Yet the new man in the dugout, Johnathan McKinstry chose not to read from that script midweek. Wasswa was an unused substitute as Uganda drew a blank in Ouagadougou. Could this be the beginning of the end? Many people have been quick to write Wasswa’s international football epitaph.

They rightly hold that the midfield pivot of Khalid Aucho and Mike Azira will be impossibly hard to break as the central defensive tandem of Murshid Juuko and Timothy Awany. What they fail to notice is Wasswa’s fighting spirit. He still bears the battle scars of devastating body blows that would rock any player.

A physical as well as intellectual presence on the pitch, Wasswa’s mental fortitude has helped him triumph over many odds. The educated guess from many is that the stocky player is currently surplus to requirements because he hasn’t been active at club level.

Others say there could be more than meets the eye seeing as Wasswa started all games at Afcon 2019 despite being unattached. What isn’t in doubt is that this latest setback won’t take the wind out of his sails.

Even if it does, it shouldn’t stain what Wasswa has been able to achieve with the Cranes. Many Johnny-come-lately players could certainly do with his longevity and mental fortitude. So celebrate him; don’t hound him.

Masaba walks in the footsteps of Davis Karashani

The ties that bind Brian Masaba and Davis Karashani are plain to see.
The two love to refer to each other as brother, but theirs is no blood relation. It is, some would argue, something much deeper.
Parallels can be drawn between a battlefield as we know it and the 22-yard length/10-foot width of a cricket pitch.

From the trenches, assaults on one common foe are all that counts. To get to command those assaults, one has to put in the hours...burn the midnight oil.

The ascent of both Masaba and Karashani to the Cricket Cranes captaincy are not too dissimilar. Both were the ultimate outsider with odds heavily stacked against them. Getting into the Cricket Cranes XI was for starters impossibly difficult.

Karashani started knocking on the door at a time when playing two spinners in a cricket XI popped eyes. Cricket Cranes’ number one spinner was the irrepressible Franco Nsubuga. End of story.
Except it wasn’t. Karashani retooled his game and showed selectors that he could morph into a bowling all-rounder when push came to show.

And it did even though his doggedness with the bat didn’t stop Uganda from suffering marginal if heartrending defeats against Papua New Guinea in 2011 and USA years later.

It was Karashani’s cricketing brain more than bowling all-rounder credentials that selectors were most interested in.

No-one read situations better, came up with better field placements. Masaba would also earn similar plaudits when he announced his arrival on the cricket scene with probably some of the best disguised slower balls the Schools Cricket Week has ever seen.

He too retooled, metamorphosing from a bowler to bowling all-rounder and then batting all-rounder. In between, some cynics dismissed him as a specialist fielder.

But not once did his head drop. He will now be calling the shots on the pitch as the Cricket Cranes look to write great chapters. His is in many respects a familiar triumph.

What we now know....

We know that the Uganda Sevens have a repechage tournament with tickets to the Tokyo Olympics to look forward to in June of 2020.
We know that Tolbert Onyango’s charges failed to nail down an automatic ticket to the Olympics after twice losing at the hands of the old foe, Kenya, including tellingly also in the final.

In truth, Uganda stood no chance after choosing to take the ball into the contact area for long spells of both matches against their close door neighbours. Kenya has always been good at the breakdown. This we know for sure.

[email protected]
@robertmadoi