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Harare Bureau
WARRIORS’ coach Ian Gorowa was yesterday left fuming after Zifa and the Premier Soccer League reportedly struck a deal in which the top-flight body arranged midweek fixtures, which disrupted the gaffer’s plans to start the national team’s training camp this morning.

The Warriors will host Mozambique in their final World Cup African Zone Group G qualifier at Rufaro on Sunday and Gorowa had demanded that his players assemble in Harare last night with a view to starting their training this morning.

Gorowa is aware that the Warriors are already out of the reckoning for the World Cup following a horrible campaign in which they are winless and only have a point to show for their efforts in five Group G qualifiers.

But the new Warriors coach has other ideas and had opted to use a squad of locally-based players against Mozambique as part of the first steps to prepare for the African Nations Championships finals in South Africa next January.

Kaizer Chiefs anchorman Willard Katsande is the only foreign-based player in the squad. Gorowa insists the Warriors rarely get a chance to play international fixtures and felt that Mozambique tie would provide his charges with another platform to build on their sensational 1-0 upset of Zambia in their final Chan qualifier in Ndola on August 24.

The 41-year-old coach was last month also not amused when the PSL arranged mid-week fixtures ahead of the Chan final qualifier against Zambia, which meant that his charges only got together on the Friday before the match.

It is the same scenario that Gorowa will now face with a full league programme starting tomorrow across the country. Even Gorowa’s assistants Callisto Pasuwa of Dynamos and Mkhuphali Masuku of Chicken Inn have been forced to remain at their teams with their respective club bosses indicating that they needed them for the league duties after it had emerged that Zifa and the PSL had made a secret pact on the release of the Warriors players.

A angry Gorowa, who once again threatened to walk away from the Warriors job, said the actions by the administrators had literally reduced the senior national team “to a social side that meets only on the eve of the game’’.

“When we played Zambia at home I had players on a Friday and even though I was not happy about it I did not make much noise. Now they are saying the same thing is going to happen and I may have to demand that Zifa invoke the Fifa statutes because this is a Fifa game and the national team can have players released five days prior to the match.

“As far as I am concerned I want my players in camp. If you look at countries like South Africa and Botswana, there are no league games this week but we don’t seem to take our national team seriously in Zimbabwe so much that we do not see the value of having a training camp for it,’’ Gorowa said.

He said although the result of their match against Mozambique would not have much impact on the Group G standings, he was looking beyond just the score line of that match.

“We cannot go on with a trend where people do not respect the national team and treat it like a boozers’ side that does not need to train. I did not raise hell before the Zambia game hoping that it would be the last time that such arrangement was going to be made but I see we have the same problem again and I don’t want to be dragged into the administrative issues.

All I want are the 25 players that I called up so that we can carry on with the national team business at hand.
“I have said that we need to start our Chan build up right away and that is where our focus should be on right now and that is why this match is important to me. I have not said PSL games should be stopped but I have asked that those players called for national duty be released and those clubs with three or more players should be allowed to exercise their prerogative of either fulfilling the game or having it postponed.

“Everybody has known about this Fifa game all along so it is not something that has just come up so the midweek games could have been moved to dates soon after the Mozambique match,’’ Gorowa said.

However, PSL chief executive Kenny Ndebele was singing a different tune and revealed that he had, after consulting with his Zifa counterpart Jonathan Mashingaidze, agreed that the league’s fixtures would go ahead tomorrow and Thursday.

Ndebele said they had in agreeing with Zifa also taken cognisance of the fact that the association had agreed on an international friendly between the Warriors and Bafana Bafana in Johannesburg but Gorowa maintained that he had picked South African based professionals for that encounter.

“We spoke to Zifa and we understand the national team is going to South Africa next week so we could not arrange midweek fixtures for that period.

“Our intention is to finish the season by November 30 so that the national team can have at least five uninterrupted weeks of a training camp before the Chan tournament.

“If the midweek games are not played this week, we will face the challenge of teams like Tripple B going for another three weeks without a game. As it is the next league games will be on September 14 because we have the BancABC final on September 21 and we have to ask Mbada Diamonds to postpone their dates.

“We have to protect all the sponsors too and try to have a win-win situation. Of course the Mozambique game is on a Fifa date but we would not  want to look at which are the Fifa dates and which are not because we have already bent backwards to accommodate the Cosafa tournament and the Chan games which are not on the Fifa calendar,’’ said Ndebele.