Middendorp earns last laugh as Singida Fountain Gate FC loses grip on

It sort of fits in with an expression that ‘great men appear in life as it were, twice – first as tragedy and then as farce’.

The debate on the conflict he had with the inland newly ascending side is now settled, at the expense of the club, after a misfortune.

There is no way that the Singida club leadership will avoid an unfavourable pros and cons of their selection compared with the departed coach, and whether what he said has a bearing on the results in the return match.

There are likely to be several disparately connected issues but the outcome and especially either the pattern of play or timetable of failure brings up unmistakable parallels with the first match, where the Middendorp dispute was played out.

The return match thus offers the proof to what the coach would be saying, one cannot lose 4-1 and win a dispute.

The tragedy is how many of us- cannot say most though it may be quite appropriate in the circumstances – tended to admit that the coach had a point as to the side being handled professionally, but there was room for comprehending what club leaders had demanded.

With the thrashing in the return match, and especially the second-half breakdown of sorts, the earlier benefit of the doubt given to club officials is removed and pushed wholly on the side of the departed coach.

Hiring an experienced coach who has handled clubs like Orlando Pirates is meant to avoid such defeats, the sort the city archrivals used to obtain in Cairo, Tunis, and Casablanca.

Admittedly, they did not crash at 5G thunder that others had chalked up in the past, but it was a sharp slap in the face for a situation where at the exit of the German national, a club spokesman said they were playing a weak Egyptian team and the coach was messing up everything.

Now it is the time for the leadership there to eat their words, and learn a simple truism that a weak team cannot qualify for a CAF contest from a league as powerful as Egypt. Not even Dynamos were a weak team.

What was most instructive about the second match and the first is that the Singida side again put up a good performance in the first half, and part of the second half, and then appeared to lose bearings as time went on.

This is the lesson that the club leadership did not seem to learn earlier, as pundits acknowledged that during the second half the local side was praying for time to end rather than using it for a better outcome.

As Future FC’s head coach noticed, he may have played a similar waiting frame which the local side took as definitive, and rallied the troops later, it is also a test of match fitness where Singida Big Stars may have problems. 

Many will say that for the tournament they were involved in, the team was just right to put up a good show if it had the right handling, which takes us back to the coaching dispute.

This calls for examining another side of the matter, as to how far local coaches leave aside the match fitness issue and how far they can enforce it, or impress upon the players to exert themselves more, is tactical.

It is unlikely that a local coach could enter into the mind of the Future FC head coach as to how the home side would best handle the game, thus walking into a designed trap.

Another irony is the club name and what it spells for Singida Fountain Gate FC at the moment, that is, Modern Future FC as that is just what is needed at the Singida outfit, and no one knows where it starts.

If the break had not been so loudly aired or consummated, if he had just gone home to reassess the situation, he could be the right person to restart the side with a ‘modern’ vision.

Now that this is out of the way, it is a question of picking up from where Middendorp left off, asking another well-appreciated coach to proceed, and keeping club convictions aside, to let him work.

Playing with ten men on the pitch and terrorizing the visitors consistently from the 70th minute or so instead of being forced to move into defense was symptomatic of the difficulty the visiting side faced. 

The fact that the goals started coming in the 65th minute or so, and maintained up to injury time shows that a come-back attack strategy was in place, and Singida was weak enough to allow it to work as planned even with the home side down to ten men on the pitch.

Tactically that was simply inexcusable and it speaks of either fractures or weaknesses that the home side had seen, not the visiting team’s coach.

They used either that weakness or a combination of weaknesses to realize their goals despite a red card, a team they said was ‘weak’.