Here is why Saul-to-Paul conversion of new Cranes head coach is a stretch

November, sweet November, the birth month of your columnist, is here, and the rains continue to pound Kampala. Grasshoppers? Not much so.

The good people of Masaka are nonetheless adamant that these insects, which are a great source of protein this side of the year, will blip on the radar sooner than later.

For now, the rains have our collective attention. This despite—or in fact because—their ferocious vigour and unsparing brutality that the weatherman predicted being fleeting. Mother Nature has threaded through Kampala's appallingly bad road network with unintended sinister repercussions of cosmetic—as opposed to reconstructive—surgeries taking centre-stage.

The cosmetic surgeries, whose resurfacing method KCCA has colourfully christened “forward maintenance,” have—much like the current goings-on at the club it bankrolls in Uganda’s top flight football league—proved to be an expensive experiment. 

Just the other day, your columnist had three nails pulled out of a rear tyre on his automobile. Since Kampala is a construction site in perpetuity, whenever the heavens let loose, nails—the likes of which ended up being lodged in the tyre of yours truly—are deposited into potholes. When the rains wash away the thin layer of cosmetics, and you are unsuccessful in your attempts at tiptoeing around the road craters, a trip to the tyre clinic is inevitable.

In a sense, Ugandan football mirrors the difficult realities that continue to intrude on Kampala's part gravel, part dirt roads. It has a morbid tendency to go cosmetic when the doctor's recommendation is reconstructive. It is also a forever workshop of sorts whose excesses deflate hopes much like those little pointed objects do tyres. 

The local football fraternity is almost unanimous in returning the verdict that it is not spared the visitations of a fatalistic mood because of Fufa’s ineptitude. The chance to press a reset button has been bungled as many times Elizabeth Taylor did her marriages. Probably much more. 

In a world where people put much stock in seeming perfect, Uganda’s football governing body is quite the opposite. Fufa has been accused of incessantly failing to sanitise its image. It is highly unlikely to break ranks with the chequered track record after handing the Cranes reins to a Belgian journeyman.

Surprise does not begin to describe the reaction of many a respected observer when Paul Put was unveiled as the head coach of the Ugandan national football team Thursday morning. Besides the headache of shooting a new TV ad for that packaged drinking water brand, Nivana, Put’s past does not quite unfold with a dazzling array of vignettes. It is saddled with a long list of vexing issues. The shock and shame of some of the issues are too overwhelming. 

With a troubling history hanging heavy, it would be foolhardy to expect an uneventful, if not exactly stress-free, spell with the Belgian in the Cranes dugout. Despite Put exuding a careful, coaxing charm during his unveiling this past week, many Cranes fans just cannot get past the idea of his own fragility. His dark past, to be vaguely specific. 

Put's recent struggles as a coach also mean that feats in years gone by with the likes of Burkina Faso and Guinea should not be digested in isolation. I mean it was just the other day in March that Congo Brazzaville looked so clueless on his watch en route to suffering a 2-1 defeat at home to a 10-man South Sudan outfit.

At the backend of this month, there will probably be a greater chance of grasshoppers descending on Kampala than that of the Cranes hitting the ground running under Put. They come up against one of his former sides—Guinea—during a 2026 Fifa World Cup qualifier in Conakry on November 17.