Why Fufa’s recent age grade football exploits should have officials rolling up their sleeves
Uganda’s men under-17 team today starts a journey it hopes will pass easily, culminating in a regional title defence on December 22. And with that appearance in the final, as is now often the case, an assurance of continental football in Morocco next year.
If actualised, this wave will have many swelling with pride. What will make such a wave unlike anything that has come before it is the fact that the national men’s under-20 team will play at next year’s Africa Cup of Nations finals as Cecafa champions.
As the promise of more hangs in the air, there is a whiff of complacency dressed up as pride. Some of it is conscious, some subliminal, but it is there. Conscious or subliminal, a few wise heads have cautioned against the false belief that Ugandan age grade football has come together in the most spectacular of ways.
Grass-roots football, they add, is hardly dazzling in its ruthless sense of purpose. Indeed, instead of chest-thumping, Fufa’s top brass should be punishingly self-critical.
Perhaps the zeal of Fufa officials, which could end up being pernicious in its consequences, is not widely shared because Caf lowered the bar of qualification to its age grade tournaments.
While such a brutal conclusion risks suggesting a level of disdain for Cecafa opponents, Ugandan football – at senior and junior level alike – has always had a tanta-lisingly obvious weakness.
This soft underbelly is often brought to bear when Uganda is pitted against non-Cecafa opponents at the big time. All of this means that after dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, dominance in age grade football exists everywhere but in the minds of those that are neither recklessly bold nor rash.
While you can sense the pains that have been staked in maintaining Uganda’s status as a regional powerhouse, there is work to be done to translate such critical success into continental acclaim.
The talk of huge leaps being taken is, I am afraid, giving Fufa far more than it would otherwise be able to claim. Bulldozing the Cecafa region is not a handy outcome to use to reveal the sheer breadth of our talents.
This draws a parallel with the African Nations Championship or Chan whose regional qualifying events Uganda has utterly bossed. The wheels, however, al-ways come off the Cranes wagon at the big time.
Not once has the team managed to advance to the knockout stage of the continental showpiece. Such travails underline how the baseline of qualification via the regional route is an underwhelming measure of impact. When affirmative action is stripped away, Uganda all of a sudden finds itself worthy of mention only as an after-thought.
It simply makes up the numbers! Take the Caf inter-club events, they lap far beyond affirmative action. And because of this, Ugandan clubs of-ten come unstuck. Never mind that a ‘Cecafa club’ (Al-Hilal Omdurman) is responsible for Vipers SC’s latest continental blues and pangs.
In recent times, KCCA FC has proven to be ingenious and relentless on the continent. Yet it too has found continental football a cold business, no matter which players it has at its disposal.
That is not to say there have been no attempts in which the Garbage Collectors came very close to reaching the home-stretch. Their bridesmaid role and other tenuous performances of Ugandan representatives on the continent nevertheless show that now is not the time to chest thump.
Email: [email protected]: @robertmadoi
