Veteran premier league side Coastal Union FC of Tanga could not comprehend the full results of their encounter with top placed contenders Young Africans SC of Dar es Salaam, with a score of 0-8 at the end of ninety minutes, and with the scoring distributed a bit evenly during the match.
What that means is that it wasn’t just a spurt of energy after plenty of resistance but net superiority in all departments, for a team that hasn’t always been a pushover, and not certainly newcomers to the premier league contention.
While head coach Jamhuri Kihwelo ‘Julio’ isn’t in danger in his job, he may have frozen a bit.
Such scores as in the Yanga-Coastal game don’t show what a team is capable of but specific snags in how it played, and by accessory, a hidden weakness which was hitherto not quite grasped, whether with the team or with the coach, as often they are indistinguishable.
A team can be weak because the coach does not know how to use the players in the right manner, and alternatively it can be weak momentarily if the other side discovers a weakness that no one else had noticed earlier.
Even with that kind of discovery there has to be excellent combination to be able to make good use of it, and that happened.
In that case the first person to learn something when a team is thoroughly beaten is the coach, but only if he is in a position to do something about it, like putting up a more effective defence method, where no quick succession of goals is possible.
At the same time the chances of finding such a weakness and using it might be so narrow, that they need a particular combination of players which so far only Yanga would have succeeded to find such a pattern, in which case it might not be something for the coach to actually do something about it. It is one of those things, like in the Brazil-Germany encounter mid 2014.
Curiously enough, there are other combinations which are hard to figure out but often come up with some profound scrutiny, or a pattern of questioning and plotting results against chance factors like ground or day of the week.
At one time someone said Yanga has never defeated Simba (or was it the other way round) if they play at the National Stadium on a Saturday but it could win on a Sunday, and then another said that if it rains, Simba (or the other way round) stands a solid chance to win, or is by far and away the favorite.
They are irrational factors governing results, and no coach can act on such items.
If one goes far enough, at times there are personal chance factors that come into play, or the jersey color that the losing team would have put on, and that sort of thing.
But the point is that if one was to go far into that result and examine a series of psychological factors, some unfamiliar relationships would come up that bring up that result as a credible outcome for that particular day.
At times it prefigures something else, for instance when Arsenal lost by a similar margin (1-8) (was it to Manchester United) and they went all out for a defender, a top level snatch, buying German international Per Mertesacker.
The name, pronounced or interpreted in Kiswahili or eastern Bantu, means searching for the person…. By any chance Coastal Union have to think of boosting their defences, as it is possible someone might have been missing from injury, or simply struggling to play to standard or to form, and a gap opened up as in the Brazilian night, or the famous city rivals’ encounter in 1976 when Yanga lost 0-6.
It is mostly a one-off event where the club might discover some unsavory things about the strength of its line up, and if it doesn’t quite succeed in doing that, simply curse its luck.
However, someone’s position would be a bit insecure, either the players as the registration season approaches, or the coach, for club confidence.
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