We must sympathise with Taifa Stars coach

Those who are familiar with such tasks, or at least how such matters have once in a while happened in various countries will most likely realise that there is little in that direction that the head coach can enterprise at present. There could be efforts to reorganise or revamp the side, certainly not to ‘restructure’ the team; the difference here lies well beyond spellings, synonyms.

When a team is reorganised (which means the same thing as revamping), it is in a sense limited to player composition, changing components of each department to suit some design, or change of tactics as preferred by the coach. Even then it isn’t the case that an existing coach revamps or reorganises a side, but if there is need for a change of guard, then the new coach, imbued with new tactics and playing methods, moves to reorganise the team. In other words there is an extensive task that a new coach is given by TFF, not a coach moving to reorganise work.

For one thing, coach Mayanga may still be in position to do as much as that since he has been in office for a rather short period, and in a way that may have been a learning phase, and could not move into ‘reorganisation’. If that were the case it would still raise problems about whether he was the right person to take over the team if he had no plans of his own in the first place, and can only start thinking of changes on account of his own shortcomings or poor results as coach. In that sense the matter is driven back to the point of departure, that he can’t reorganise himself.

Since it is the coach who made that announcement and not the Tanzania Football Federation (TFF), it means that there is no ‘reconstruction’ agenda at the TFF level but the coach is under pressure about performance,. This touches off the idea of ‘reconstruction’ but at the level of the coach instead of the federation, in which case the coach is signaling his players that ‘business as usual’ approaches are at an end, and something will have to be done. Fine, this could lead to obtaining results in the next run of matches, but is unlikely to change the place Tanzania occupies.

In other words, it is one thing to seek to improve performance, and even then there will be ups and downs. No ‘restructuring’ even at the level of major revamping starting with having a new coach goes without a glitch.  So there is restructuring of how the technical bench operates, what is expected of players, training schedules…

Hopefully Mayanga is up to the task in putting emphasis on some technical aspects that promise to have an impact in how the team plays or the bench manages a whole match. But that is a far cry from rebuilding the national side such that it is a different outfit from what is has traditionally been, and even restore some glamour when we could hold on our own with some good West African teams. Or stood a good chance of bagging the East African Challenge Cup,  which in the past decade has usually been shared out between Kenya and Uganda. All that isn’t within the ambit of what the coach can do; it relates to the state of local football generally.