Cameroon: Indomitable Lions – Beyond Discipline

Monda Bakoa

20 June 2011

The most recent scars inflicted on the minds of Cameroonians by the poor performances of their darling national football team, the Indomitable Lions, are hard to remove.

After distributing points to their opponents at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa and returning home with none, the Lions have continued to inflict more wounds on their fans with insidious spectacles. Their last show against the Teranga Lions of Senegal at the Ahmadou Ahidjo Stadium, in front of their own home crowd was, to say the least, disgustful. Today, only Cameroonians with exaggerated optimism still hope the country’s national team will qualify for the final phase at the forth-coming Africa Cup of Nations competition scheduled for next-door Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. As the saying goes, it is never forbidden to dream.

But considering the present dispensation where the team is moving from one mistake to the other, further jeopardizing the chances of even future performances, the right dream is to see the Lions come out of the existing mess. From every indication, only a miracle of the year can take them to Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Popular opinion is that rather than cry over spilled milk, these series of failures ought to serve as solid base for the complete reformation of the team. We are talking here about public opinion, but does this tie with the opinions of the players themselves and those of the management team? The answer seems to be a monosyllabic NO!

If the general concern; or call it the concerns of the public, were to be concretised, the main challenge now should be to identify the errors of the past, ponder over them and set up a completely new team. The decision to summon three players, team captain, Samuel Eto’o Fils, and two other team mates, Alexandre Song and Benoit Assou Ekoto, before the disciplinary committee for indiscipline, is laudable. Cameroonians who have been following up the Lions will hardly condemn the decision. The dust raised by acts of indiscipline committed by some of the players at the last FIFA World cup is yet to settle as the media keep hammering on them. Only a team whose disciplinary machine has come to a halt will swallow what happened in the field during the Cameroon-Senegal match where the team captain openly refused the replacement of a player by his coach. Acts of indiscipline even go beyond the stadium with players reportedly involved in reproachable attitudes in hotels, night clubs and other public places.

The results of the disciplinary committee pending, the question on some lips is whether the trouble with the Lions does not go beyond indiscipline. Has the administrative team been up to the task? Memories remain fresh of the squabbles between the Ministry of Sports and Physical Education and the Cameroon Football Federation (FECAFOOT) when it comes to managing the national team. On several occasions, the Ministry has found its wings clipped in front of FECAFOOT which hides under the cover of its mother FIFA organization. In the same vein, many of the head coaches recruited from Europe refuse to stay in the country to monitor the performances of home-based players. They appear sporadically when competitions are announced to select only players they have watched on television during European Champs. Of course, this has often produced the results we know today. The whole gamut of these hurdles militate in favour of a complete reformation of the national team.

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