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| Image credit: Online |
The Warriors, Zimbabwe’s national
men’s soccer team, failed to progress past the group stages of the 2017 Africa
Cup of Nations in Gabon, displaying a lack of technical ability and talent.
Zimbabweans expected a better
performance from the team on the third time of asking, having failed to reach
the quarter finals on two previous attempts in 2004 and 2006, but the warriors
were consistent in mediocrity.
I will let football pundits
criticise the team’s on-pitch display and focus on the failures of the national
broadcaster, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), in their coverage of
the tournament.
There seemed to be attempts to
expand the pool of analysts by ZBC and like the warriors supporters, I had high
expectations of the broadcasters – again like the warriors supporters, I was
disappointed.
The first question which came to
my mid was where is the female voice? After sending a women’s team to both the Olympics
and African Cup could ZBC fail to find a female analyst for this tourney?
In this respect Star Fm provides
an example, in Yvonne Mangunda, that women can spice up football analysis. But
ZBC stuck with their now monotonous presenters reciting cliché phrases.
After the warriors stalemate with
Algeria, I complained to a group of friends that the ZBC was celebrating
mediocrity by praising a team which failed to win a match they dominated to
which one friend quckly noted that I was even more mediocre for watching ZBC. Indeed
there is a lot of truth in that response but there are many without any option
and have to watch Denford Mutashu comment on everything from bond notes to
football.
ZBC has perfected the art of
sticking to the same analysts and pundits with identical opinions such that it
cannot rock the boat and include female voices lest they deviate from the norm.
Many people want to feel the
ambience of tournaments, a feeling which can only be evoked by someone who has had similar experiences. To do this, the ZBC
did not have to look far as there is a pool of female players who battled it
out for the country against Africa about a month ago.
Ambience aside, ZBC just has to
stutter towards public service broadcasting by becoming an inclusive
broadcaster at least with respect to gender dimensions.
However, the chauvinistic slant
of the ZBC dries up the juice in the very few programmes one would not mind
watching such that on any scale, the broadcaster has only one rating – boring!
Yes, a panel with consistency from
veterans like lovemore Banda and Charles Mabika is good, punditry from former soccer players
like Alois Bunjira and Tonderai Ndiraya is better but ambience and diversity
from immediate precedent tournament participants like the Mighty warriors would
have been the best. - Society 24
