Onyango longevity in Uganda Cranes is a beauty to behold

A few weeks ago, Denis Onyango made a guest appearance on NTV’s premier sports talk show PressBox.
His wide-ranging interview was as enlightening as it was candid.
The Cranes skipper didn’t quite quieten the emotional tenor of Ugandans in the grip of fear about his intention to bring the curtain down on an illustrious international career after the 2019 Afcon finals. If anything, for those whom the impending retirement is the sum of all fears, the revelation by the 32-year-old that his pulse is strong enough to maintain a hulking presence in goal for six more years was torturous in every conceivable way.
The sentimental reaction is in a sense understandable principally because Onyango’s strong showing owes more to his brilliance than the stumbles of others.
That he firmly believes he can keep going well into the tail-end of his thirties speaks volumes about his surrealistic longevity more than anything else.
Longevity is something that cannot be ascribed to many Ugandan sports personalities.
Not even goalkeepers that traditionally find it easier to play almost for eternity.
In fact, history is replete with many who have eventually been seized by an unconquerable timidity. William Tamale, anyone? It’s not that they didn’t have local role models to look up to. Far from it.
The likes of Sadiq Wassa and Fred Kajoba had long, productive careers between the sticks to mention but two.
So the million dollar question is: will we come full circle?
This column has previously purred over up and coming goalkeepers like Bashir Sekagya, Saidi Keni and Tom Ikara. Less talked about, but no less fundamental, is whether they will stand the test of time and keep on going. They need to look no further than Onyango for inspiration.
He has weathered the buffets of injuries, gaffes and rough patches en route to writing his name in the stars. Most pretenders to Onyango’s gloves can hardly recover from a minor scratch to their paintwork.
The description has come to be chillingly accurate for Ikara who’s fallen further down the pecking order at KCCA FC.
Even for those well placed to replace Onyango -- the likes of Jamal Salim Magoola and Charles Lukwago -- one rightly gets the sense that scars from past battles have not fully healed. They don’t seem to be as mentally strong as they should be. Which is why you as sure as hell must expect Fufa officials to talk Onyango into reconsidering retiring.
And they should, your columnist reckons, come up successful.

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Why sacking of Cubs coach is in bad taste

An old dictum that has burned itself into the consciousness of sports urges us not to fix that that’s not broken.
Fufa though does not seem to have a fine instinct for such parlance so much so that it has chosen to send on gardening leave the coach that secured qualification to the 2019 Africa under-17 Cup of Nations finals.
All this would be unremarkable if the biennial youth football tournament was not months away from kicking off. As it is, Uganda will face Angola, Nigeria and hosts Tanzania between April 14-20 without Peter Onen in the dugout.
In tearing the lid off the proverbial Pandora’s box, Fufa released another kind of trouble by delaying to name the new coach who will also be handed the reins for the under-20 team. Bedding in will be a tough needle to thread for the new coach who will undoubtedly stride into a situation for which he is ill-prepared.
There will be shades of Sébastien Desabre at the 2018 African Nations Championship (Chan), a tournament, which only weeks into the job, the Frenchman was uniquely unprepared to run the rule over.
So much for once bitten twice shy! Fufa appears to be shooting itself in the foot yet again. This is different though.
The tragedy at the 2018 Chan was one launched by innocence and good intentions. Milutin ‘Micho’ Sredojevic had created a void that needed to be filled. Nature abhors vacuum.
The current gaping hole in the national under-17 backroom staff is, however, in many respects self-inflicted. The unassuming Onen deserved much better after having earned his stripes remarkably where the finals will be staged.
If Fufa thought it wise to ring the changes, conventional wisdom suggested that they do so after the tournament has run its course in Tanzania.

What we know now

We now know that Allan Kabonge is having a rough ride in a league he essentially should be familiar with. Kabonge has scripted a couple of resounding successes in Ugandan club football’s second tier. The wind, though, has been taken out of his sails this time round. We know that ten matchdays into this season’s Big League have held up a stark and undeniably bad record for Kabonge. He well and truly appears to be mired in ordure as a return of one solitary win suggests (he’s drawn five and lost three). It might be a stretch to conclude that danger signs are there in profusion, but it will undoubtedly take something extra special for Kabonge to have Entebbe FC scale heights that Onduparaka and Paidha Black Angels reached. That much we know.