Time Cecafa Revamped Regional Club Tourney

The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)

25 June 2011

Tanzania is bracing to host the East and Central Africa Club Championship, which opens today in Dar es Salaam and Morogoro regions, a tournament that will feature 12 teams.

For two weeks, the crème de la crème of the region’s club football – not to mention tens of scouts, journalists and sports officials – will converge in the country for the competition also known as Kagame Cup. For Tanzania’s flag bearers in the championship, Young Africans, Simba and Zanzibar’s Ocean View, it will be an opportunity to set aside the disappointment of their embarrassing show in this year’s Confederation of African Football (CAF) club competitions.

For years, this championship has remained one of the Council of East and Central Africa Football Association’s most important competitions. However, scenes that have preceded the championship in the recent past suggest that the event is gradually losing the enthusiastic support it enjoyed in the past from the business community and the public in general. To make things worse, the Cecafa member nations have of late been shying away from hosting the championship, a trend that threatens to further impair its quality.

This year’s competition was to take place in Zanzibar, but it was moved to Sudan after the original hosts failed to raise enough money to host it.

Later, Sudan football authorities said they could not host it due unrest in their country. The hosts of the event remained a puzzle until early this month when Tanzania salvaged the situation.

We are not foretellers to know what will happen next, but we think it is high time the Cecafa leadership came up with new ideas on how best to run the Kagame Cup which is the most celebrated club competition in Sub-Saharan Africa.

To Yanga, Simba and Ocean View, we would like to remind them that reaching the final would be nice, but nothing short of a trophy will restore Tanzania’s faith in its football.Most Tanzanians would expect the three teams to come out fighting with flair and determination to claim the elusive title and the jackpot that goes with it. All the best!

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