By Edward Chisanga
When the final whistle blew after laboring for over ninety minutes without winning goals, the face of each Zambian was obvious. Zambia had just been doomed to a perpetual football life of wretchedness and anguish – a state only those in denial want to refuse to accept. Chipson was perhaps more affected than I was because he expects nothing less from a team, he is proud to call ‘Chipolopolo’. I don’t.
When I told him that I expected nothing else, he was furious with anger, dismay and frustration which forced him to draw nearer where I was standing and remarked, “Only a non-Zambian wants Zambia to lose an international football match. So, I’m assuming that you’re not Zambian, for how can you be so composed and look as if nothing happened?”
“I didn’t say I want Zambia to lose. Like you, I want them to win all the time. But we are all so used to this immeasurably low and uninspired performance that only those in denial like you will pretend that you’ve a national team. The nickname ‘Chipolopolo’ that you’re so proud of was meant to reflect toughness, fearlessness, athletic, enduring, vigorousness, tenacity, robustness and other related words. I think Chipolopolo in Zambia means bullets. But, important as this name may be, it does not reflect the single most important characteristic of a good football team. You don’t need to be a bullet in order to score goals. Goal-scoring is a product of quality, not bulletness. It is a combination of toughness and quality or skills. In fact, Messi of Argentina is nowhere near Chipolopolo but is the best player in the world. So, my proposal is to remove this Chipolopolo and replace it with something more footballing and more winning mentality.”
In a posture that communicates defiance, Chipson my comrade asked, “How would removing the name Chipolopolo help the team to win next time?”
“You know well that it is misleading to continuously call Chipolopolo someone who is in the final phase of senile decrepitude or simply deficient. The mismatch between the name and meaning of Chipolopolo and what the team does on the pitch is glaringly clear. Zambians are unfair to keep on referring to Chipolopolo when they clearly know the team has failed to live with it.”
He asked, “So, are you suggesting that we should then modify the name to suit the reality on the ground?”
“Now you’re talking Chipson. I understand that when David, the small man defeated Goliath, the giant in the Bible, the latter accepted to change his name to suit his status on the ground. The national team players will be more than happy to be given a more suiting name. They know their overly-growing weaknesses. They know they cannot remediate. Resources are lacking. They’re asked to do more than the resources they have. Most don’t look athletic. I’m not sure about their diet but certainly my guess is that most will agree with me that this is insufficient. Word has it that for many years, or ever since the perished team, there have been calls by many players to redefine the name but some people especially in the PF leadership were resisting. They preferred the existing name.”
“Why would they resist and what do politicians have to do with this?”
“They thought the name masked their economic stains. They’re responsible for the failure of the national team which they failed to provide sufficient funding. They spent public funds on building bad-quality roads, clinics and football stadiums. Yes, they built football stadiums but failed to build a formidable team. For me, it is better to build a good team first, then good stadiums. Otherwise, of what use is a good football stadium without a good team? They built the national team good stadiums but it is foreign teams that come to Zambia to effectively make use of them. The owners of the stadiums look like passengers all the time they’re playing in their own stadiums while visitors look like the owners.”
“I agree with you. The money that PF politicians spent on erecting huge stadiums has not translated into building a quality football team. They also stole too much money and cared less about building a strong and quality national team. It seems correct to state that they were stealing while covering up in the stadiums, roads and bridges. It seems to have become worse when Zambians sat in new stadiums to justify that PF was working for them when it was stealing the bigger part of public funds.”
“But what is it about Equatorial Guinea that makes them beat Zambia? I thought we were a much bigger and stronger country economically?”
“You’ve to look at some stunning and flustering statistics. Zambia’s gross domestic product (GDP) is about $18 billion compared to about half of that for Equatorial Guinea. Zambia’s population is about eighteenfold that of Equatorial Guinea. However, Equatorial Guinea’s per capita is about sixfold that of Zambia. So, while Zambia may be ahead in terms of GDP and population, the actual economic strength of each Equatorial Guinean is much larger than that for each Zambian by measure of per capita. Even with a much smaller GDP, perhaps Equatorial Guinea government is spending adequately on building its national team.”
“And, yes, unlike Zambia, I think many of Equatorial Guinea players play their football outside their country, and in good teams. This is perhaps the main explanation why they beat Zambia. I could be wrong because internet formation may not always be up to date. I searched the internet and found that several players are based in developed countries, more advanced developing countries, etc while most of our players are based in Zambia. The point is that despite being a smaller country, Equatorial Guinea seems to have done better in terms of exporting its players in countries where football is more advanced than in Africa.”
“I cannot agree more with you my comrade,” submitted Chipson who later excused himself to go and attend to his son who was training in football at Heroes Stadium, I too went to pick up my son who had now finished his training with the Barcelona FC based in Lusaka. We both hoped that the new Zambian political leadership would do something different in addressing the problem of shambolic performance by our national team including changing its name from Chipolopolo to something more meaningful and exacting.”
