Latest Updates

August/September 2007

Well after the excitement and the disappointment of the games in June against Senegal and Morocco it was off to Cyprus for a break to see my beautiful little girls, not to mention my wife! We have at last moved to Cyprus where we will now be based and I will commute as it were from Malawi to Cyprus whenever possible.

As I am sure many of you know it is no holiday moving house never mind from one country to another, as we had to unpack boxes we have had in storage for years, then the shipment from England came the day before I left for Malawi so you can imagine the chaos, thankfully we got a lot of things done before I left, thanks mainly to Lucy though she is still unpacking boxes two weeks later.
I also got to see many of my friends in between boxes and it is nice that after so many years of travelling I now have a permanent base.

On the football side I got to go back to my old club in Cyprus AEL where it was nice to be received so well after ten years by the supporters when I attended a training session there. Football in Cyprus has changed a great deal over the last few years and with the influx of so many foreign players the quality of play is improving as well, as with all European countries however the local based players are suffering as cheaper foreign imports come in and deny them valuable experience in the end it will be the National team that suffers. I am all for Mr Sepp Blatters plan of creating the rule that says that there must be 6 locally based players on the pitch at anyone time or in the squad, my interpretation of that is that they must be born in the local country as we have and see in the Premiership teams fielding eleven players from different countries and while that is great in terms of the level of play it is surely but slowly reducing the developmental possibilities for local players and this will affect all National teams in the long run…

We have plenty of problems in Malawi but not that problem; we are trying to get our players out in order to gain valuable experience and help raise the level of play...

As September approaches we are getting ready for our final game of the African Cup of Nations qualifiers and that means a tough away trip to Zimbabwe who are a very good side though like us not without their own problems and so I expect a tough game on the 9th of September.

We will gather the lads together on the 3rd and have a couple of days before heading over to Zimbabwe, we will hopefully have the services of our overseas players as I think we have a decent team when they are all present. It will now be our policy to play senior games only on FIFA calendar dates as we have so many of our players abroad that using just the local players against bigger and better teams does not really help us. We will try and create a National B side which we will use as a developmental team whereby our fringe players and up and coming players get the opportunity to get the experience they need.

So there you have the news for the last two months and hopefully in the next edition I can give you some good news and a positive result from Zimbabwe.