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Innocent Kurira, Sports Reporter
ZIMBABWE’S senior women’s football side got to know their opponents for the Cosafa women’s championships to be held in Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa, from September 15-26.

The question now is what are the country’s goals going into the competition?

The Mighty Warriors may be six-time winners of the competition, but the reality now is that winning the competition is now a dream too far.

One cannot talk of the Cosafa tournament as a platform for player development, as there has been nothing to talk about at grassroots level for the past two years.

Women’s football in Zimbabwe is dead, and continued participation in Cosafa tournaments simply serves to heap more humiliation on the country.

It’s convenient to blame the Covid-19 lockdown, which brought suspension of all sports in the country, but even before the enforced lockdown, women’s football was headed south.

The women’s league was in shambles and had lost the spark that enabled them the Mighty Warriors to emerge as regional champions six times.

During their triumph, the women’s league was competitive, but it’s existence now is just a springboard for the women’s football leader to have a seat on the Zifa board and enjoy the perks that come with it, while the game deteriorates.

Right now, coach Sithethelelwe Sibanda has nothing to choose from and has to go for the very same ladies that competed last year and lost all their group games because no ball was kicked in the women’s league since the lockdown kicked in.

What then is the goal of competing against countries with running functional leagues, while ours is virtually dead in the water?

Much of the blame for last year’s poor showing was placed on the country’s failure to have a running women’s league.

What has changed this year? We are now in the second year without women and how then do we expect different results?

In all honesty, making it past the group stage will be a miracle and Zifa should tell us why it continues to humiliate our players and the country by continuing to enter such tournaments when the ladies are not playing at home.

The Mighty Warriors’ participation in the competition is dumbfounding under the current circumstances.

Zimbabwe have been drawn in Group B of this year’s tournament with Botswana and Tanzania, who beat them last year, as well as South Sudan.

With odds stacked against her side, coach Sibanda has tried to put on a brave face, although deep down she knows it’s just another journey into the unknown.

She termed the draw a fair one and challenged Zifa to ensure that she at least gets time to train with the girls before they depart for the tournament.

She understands that knowing how her opponents play is not enough when she doesn’t know how her own players are.

She last saw them in action in the Cosafa tournament last year and they haven’t kicked a ball ever since.

Sibanda says their aim is to do better than last year and believes they can achieve this as her players were training individually at home, despite not having any monitoring mechanisms.

The tournament is just about a month away from kick-off and Sibanda must be worried that she hasn’t called up a squad since no permission has been granted to start training.

Surely the Mighty Warriors can’t just be sent to the tournament to make up the numbers, as anyone can see no prospects of success in whatever form taking into account the limbo the women’s game finds itself in.

But Zifa must explain why it is sending a team of people that have been sitting at home for 12 months to compete in tournament they have no chances of winning. What really is the motive?

Is it only about allowances that accrue to accompanying officials because whatever squad Sibanda assembles will not win anything?