At around 9:00am today, the Uganda Cranes contingent returned from Rwanda following an early exit from the Africa Nations Championships (CHAN) but received a very cold welcome from both the federation and the entire football fraternity.
The team jetted back home aboard of Air Rwanda and were only received by FUFA second vice president Darious Mugoye. It is true that they didn’t achieve the desired goal as set by their head coach Milutin ‘Micho’ Sredojevic whose target was to advance from the group stages.
Uganda exited the tournament after managing only two draws and one lose from the three games played, and no single win for that matter. Against Mali (2-2) and Zimbabwe (1-1); losing to Zambia 1-0. But for a country and federation building for the “campaign 2019” (AFCON Cameroon), the Cranes don’t by any reason deserve the cold welcome they got upon returning home today.
First and foremost, both the local football governing body (FUFA) and the entire football fraternity need to learn that in any competition there are winners and losers and particularly in the game of football, you either win or lose or draw. With that in the back of everyone’s mind, then we can learn to love and support our term in both the good and the bad times.
We may have not reached the quarter finals of the competition but there were lessons learnt by such a very young team; for example, the captain Farouk Miya is only 19-years, 18-year old Edris Lubega, 22-year old Joseph Ochaya and generally the team being composed of Under-23 national team players who had little or no experience for such a high level tournament.
Let us all try to be like coach Micho who saw many positives from the team despite the fair results; “I give the players credit for the display even when the results did not go the way we expected. The team had fresh blood with a few experienced players. There are some players who have the potential to graduate to the senior team as we now switch focus to AFCON 2017 qualifiers and the World Cup 2018 QUALIFIERS in June 2016,” Micho is quoted on the federation’s website.
Having qualified for the tournament on a continent of 54 countries is a huge achievement for our team, so let’s embrace the results we managed to get from Rwanda and thank the team for that achievement. Other giant teams like Nigeria and Morocco are also out.