Reuters Soccer Blog

Tunisians need a little patience

One cannot fault Tunisian clubs for seeking perfection but you’d think a little more patience is needed if they are ever going to achieve their dream of continental dominance.

Take the case of Etoile Sahel. They have just fired their Swiss coach Michel Decastel for “indifferent results”.

Indifferent by their definition, is second place in the league and qualification for the final of the African Confederation Cup, the continent’s equivalent of the UEFA Cup. (more…)

Dynamos give Zimbabwe an unlikely success story

In Zimbabwe people joke that when you join the queue to buy a ticket for a major football match, chances are the price will have gone up by the time you get to proffer your cash at the kiosk.

Rampant inflation in the southern African nation has robbed life of its conveniences, leading instead to shortages, blackouts and a set of bizarre daily rituals, like customers racing around the supermarket to keep up with the employees changing price tags.

The power sharing agreement signed by Robert Mugabe and his arch rival Morgan Tsvangirai was the first bit of good news in a long time for the beleaguered country; now there has been a second fillip as Zimbabwe’s most popular club have unexpectedly made it to the African Champions League semi-finals.

Dynamos have not been immune to the crisis in the country. Twice they have almost missed out on making away trips in the competition because they could not find enough foreign currency to pay for airline tickets.

They were forced to turn to fans and benefactors to scrape money together for trips to north Africa, eventually arriving just hours before the scheduled kick-off.

It has demanded a level of patience and tolerance from the players that few other footballers, in similar circumstances at the same level of a competition anywhere in the world, would ever be capable of.

But even the Dynamos squad has a limit and at the weekend there were threats of a strike as players haggled over bonus money … and just how much it would go up to keep pace with the ever-changing level of inflation.