Sua Flamingos flunk premiership opportunity

Sua Flamingos Football club who finished third in the Debswana Northern First Division league behind Ecco City Greens have themselves to blame for failing to sail through to the beMobile Premiership for next season.

A former first team player (names withheld) could not hide his disappointment at the team’s current position. The player said that when the first round resumed under the tutelage of Zimbabwean gaffer Elias Chinyemba, the team made a vow to gain automatic promotion to the top league of the country.

“As players we had a bond which was fuelled by the need to win all our games, but just before the end of the first round, the team management informed us that they wanted to beef up the team with premier league material,” the player said. He revealed that when they went to collect their cheques for December 2015 during the holiday break, they were surprised to find letters releasing nine of them from the team only to learn later that the coach was also given the boot.

“The decision to dismantle a team with a winning combination together with its head coach at the end of the first round was unwise on the part of management,” the player explained. When reached for a comment, the Chairperson of the club Bashi Albion Joseph explained that when the team gained promotion from the Division One to the Debswana First Division North, they set themselves a goal of grabbing 24 points in each round.

“We never said that we wanted to enter the premiership league straight away as we were aware of the fact that we are newcomers in the league. People normally look at the log and get excited and think that the team will make it only for them to be disappointed. We understand that we have fans all over and they have to know that the players that we released were not performing and as a team building for the future, we needed to beef up our squad to compete with the best.

As for our aim of collecting 24 points in the first round we made it but failed in the second round as we collected 16 points and lost nine. One of our players we released due to school commitment is Lapologang Motlogi who is a frequent goal scorer at Motlakase Power Dynamos,” he said.

Joseph added that their former coach Chinyemba was not fired but that, “We experienced problems with his papers as his work permit was for a second division team called Mega.Com.

“We asked the team to lend us the coach since at that time we were in desperate need of one. The team owner agreed as he said that he was owing Chinyemba some money and the new arrangement would relieve him of pressure. When the owner realised that we were doing well he then started to blackmail us  saying we should give him cash until the coach was arrested by the police and some immigration officials who informed us that it was wrong for us to have used a coach we did not have any work permit for.

However, we were warned. So we never fired the coach as there are lots of allegations making rounds to blame us of failure to gain promotion to the top league of the country,” he clarified.