Football: Cosafa Castle Cup 2007-Toothless Pirates humiliated |02 May 2007
Having conceded seven goals in two games and without themselves finding the back of their opponents’ net, The Pirates need to re-think tactics and see where they went wrong, especially after making last year’s group final only to lose 0-2 to Zambia.
Injury to some key players forced Congolese coach Raoul Shungu to field a makeshift team in the competition, but it is difficult for local football pundits to understand how is it possible for a team, even when they are playing away, to adopt a totally defensive approach.
Was it not for the presence of agile goalkeeper Nelson Sopha between the posts, The Pirates would have conceded more goals in those two matches played on Saturday and Sunday.
Would it be safe then to say that The Pirates were atrocious? They had no one shoring up the midfield and the attacking players were toothless against a remarkably effective Madagascar defence marshaled by Pascal Razakanantenaina who is used by local club side St Michel as a striker or attacking midfielder and has scored in all but one of the matches he has played here.
The 0-5 defeat to Madagascar goes down with some of the country’s team’s worst defeats in history and it leaves all football fans with a lot more questions on their minds.
One of these questions is can The Pirates, who struggled throughout the match especially in attacking front, rediscover the rather good form they had displayed in the Confederation of African Nations (Can) 2008 home matches against Mauritius and Tunisia?
Drawn in the same group as the hosts for the Seventh Indian Ocean Islands Games (IOIG) which Madagascar will organise from August 9 to 19, The Pirates, who are chasing the elusive gold medal of the quadrennial Games, need to improve further and make all the investment in them count.
Only an improved performance in their remaining Can 2008 matches and in the forthcoming IOIG would help Seychellois to believe that The Pirates aren’t as bad as the 5-0 score suggests. The Pirates would probably have lost by a slighter margin on another day, but they got outclassed on Sunday as everything Madagascar did came off flawlessly and the Malagasies’ play was helped by The Pirates’ poor tactics.
Paulin Voavy, who played here against St Michel earlier this year with Reunion side St Pauloise and has just followed a trial with Nice in France, scored a hat-trick for the Bareas of Madagascar who got their other goals from Claudio Ramiadamanana and Faneva Ima Andriatsima.
Paulin Voavy, whose big brother Amisy Voavy played for Anse Réunion, La Passe and Red Star before being transferred to St Pauloise in Reunion at the start of the 2007 season, was twice voted man-of-the-match in the space of two days.
The five goals were Madagascar’s first in six matches in their fourth participation in the annual competition and under new Malagasy care-taker coach Hervé Arsène, they lost 0-1 to three-time champions Zimbabwe in their first match on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Mozambique have qualified for the semifinals proper after winning on post-match penalties against Zimbabwe in the final of the pool ‘A’ mini tournament in Maputo on Sunday.
After both teams failed to take their chances throughout the 90 minutes of play, hosts Mozambique triumphed 5-4 after six penalty kicks taken.
Two more mini groups – B and C – are scheduled for May and July and the group winners will join Mozambique and holders Zambia in September’s semifinals.
Group B is made up of Malawi, South Africa, Swaziland and Mauritius, with matches scheduled for May 26 and 27 in Somhlolo, Swaziland. The group C matches will be played in Gaborone, Botswana on August 11 and 12. Angola, Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia make up group C.
The annual southern African championship is competed for by the 13 members of the Council of Southern Africa Football Associations.
G. G.