Moving on swiftly but purposefully

There is still one more game to play tomorrow but that won’t matter because Mali and round three of the World Cup qualification campaign are now firmly beyond our grasp. I have no feelings of regret though. 

We never really earned the right to be beyond this stage. Second place in Group E was as good as it was ever going to get. And in the end that 90th minute equaliser versus Kenya by Fahad Bayo last Thursday summed up our entire campaign well. Hard to beat, shy to score, at once scrappy and tenacious yes, but just not good enough.

Fufa and the Cranes set up will now come out and deliver a candid assessment of why we failed. They will say all the right things and some wrong ones too. It shall be a familiar story line and most of what will be pointed out will be mundane and routine like something off an over- used script unless it comes with refreshing suggestions on how to move on swiftly and purposefully.

 Thankfully these days there is an appreciation that it just isn’t enough to point our errors and apportion blame without suggesting solutions.
So Fufa will have to set new targets and there is a lot to aim for and at all levels. It is not immediately clear to me that we shall now aim for Afcon 2023 or the World Cup 2026 but I do hope that whatever our plans are, they include a follow up on the U20 team that made the finals of Afcon last year. Don’t let those boys fall off the radar please.

As a starting point however, and if we are to be quite honest with timelines, we are better off giving ourselves a 5–10-year planning horizon. Yes, we shall enter all competitions before us but our ultimate goal must be to start imagining how our senior team will look like in say 2027. The men who will be 21 then are 16 now. In other words, we must focus on our underage teams.
However, five years or not this is where the theory should stop. In practice moving on quickly and purposefully will involve re-focusing on the areas of administration, coaching, motivation, and infrastructure. I would however also like that the matter of recruitment be addressed.

I know recruitment to the national team is a funny animal. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me that it is always missing from our list of prescriptions, every time we do a prognosis such as the one that will follow in the coming days. 
But the thing is that for as long as we keep selecting Cranes players based on old networks and alliances and not necessarily merit, then the team will represent our collective shortcomings and none of all areas for improvement suggested above will matter.

But here we are now freshly thrown out of the campaign. There are two things that does to us. We could feel sorry for ourselves, throw around blame, patch over things and aim to get back into the mix straight away. 
Or we could kick into action right away, think things through and set about picking up the pieces and rebuilding. To me the choice to make in the circumstances is clear and easy. And it is that we get on with the task of rebuilding at all age levels. 
It won’t be easy, and success will not come overnight. In fact, there shall be many false starts. But start we must and right now in the aftermath of our elimination.

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