Mark Ssali
26 April 2011
Bringing SuperSport on board is a major coup for Ugandan football, a seal of approval for the domestic game. For the guys in charge of the Ecobank Super League, and for the clubs, thankfully and hopefully the long Easter weekend has presented enough time to pop the champagne and make merry.
Like the rest of you, I watch way too much SuperSport and it gets hard to remember on which channel, at what time and for what cause you caught a particular piece of action or saw a memorable catch-phrase; there is one such line that a click of the remote will throw at you presently, one which claims ‘the end is just the beginning’.
The ESL and the clubs have to snap out of self-congratulation and get to work; it was always going to be a tough initiation, but now there is an urgent need to really walk the talk of being a professional league.
We have already partaken of the intrinsic worth of television, and know it is about hard work, foresight and meticulous planning. Take the case of stadiums; only Namboole makes the grade now. The ESL, clubs, municipal councils and others take heed; in Kenya SuperSport started at Nyayo, but now the City Stadium, Mombasa, Thika, Naivasha and Nakuru are television worthy. Time to take our game to next level, every which way.
Wrong target
For magnitude of impact, my colleague James Ssekandi has joined the exclusive list of journalists whose work has attracted the dreaded death threat. It is a curious unit of measurement I admit, but one with a good reliability coefficient in a society where freedom of speech, human rights, rule of law, tolerance to criticism, respect for the truth and others along those lines cannot be taken for granted.
Traditionally it has been the journalists covering politics and business who have stepped on big enough toes to fear for dear life, but every once in a while the sports people face the same predicament; in Ssekandi’s case, his persistence in exposing the deliberate anomaly that has seen Baza Holdings continue to compete in the knockout Uganda Cup despite having been eliminated earlier has drawn the wrath of the first division side’s owner Bashir Kamanzi.
It could have been in the heat of the moment, or even an empty threat he has absolutely no intention of seeing through, but a man who has invested that much time and money and obviously loves the game needs to redirect his energies for greater good. He could turn his guns, so to speak, on the powers that are undermining the integrity of a sport he has sacrificed so much for.
Basena example
Moses Basena is one of those in the football fraternity with whom I have a good rapport, and my flimsy excuse for not seeing or talking to him in a long while is that he has been a busy man lately.
From what I gather, I might have to wait an even longer time for a re-union, because he is moving to a different area code altogether.
After traversing the continent with the Uganda Cranes for the last so many months, he will now pitch camp in Dar-es-Salaam as new head coach of Simba. His appointment comes in the wake of Sam Timbe’s switch from Rwanda to Simba’s eternal rivals Yanga; when one considers that Sam Ssimbwa moved from Kigali to Nairobi not so long ago, and that there are Ugandan players in Ethiopia, Sudan and four East African countries, it is clear that Uganda’s dominance of football in the region (11 Cecafa titles) is respected by our neighbours.
Reminds me of an argument I have had with mates who question my desperation for a Cranes berth in the 2012, 2013 Afcon finals, yet we should be building for the future. Its just that with a culture of short-termism, top-down success (as opposed to gradual bottom-up progress), would trigger the knock-down effect to inspire growth, in Afcon’s case of a global rather than regional scale.
AllAfrica – All the Time
Original post:
Uganda: Supersport Hallmark