The youth are oftentimes told that they are leaders of tomorrow, but they themselves feel that their leadership would rather start now. In churches, the youth are taken to be the basis of the future church, likewise in politics. But in sports, especially football, the youth are better placed to be leaders of the moment.
It is during the period of his youth when most people are most competent as footballers, yet in Malawi, it appears the future of the youth in football is as slim as it is in politics. It is very common to find that the national squad, and of course many other football clubs, have the average age of thirty, and one wonders who is going to take forward the team if the aging footballers retire.
Of course, experience is one such important aspect which most coaches go for in selection of players for a match, but a mixture of the experienced ones and the upcoming ones would do a great deal of justice to the future of the team.
One problem with people who are interested or concerned with football is that they seldom go into the remote villages to identify the hidden talent that is there. One of the main aims of the Presidential Sports Initiative was to unearth that hidden talent in the remotest parts of the country where the prospective footballers are seldom exposed.
As the presidential football tournament was kicking off at district level, top officials from the football fraternity were not very much concerned with going to the pitches to identify the unalloyed talent that is there in the ‘villages’.
Most of them became concerned only when the games at district level were approaching the final stages. In this case, many young men with potential could not be identified because there was no scout to identify them.
It was impossible for all the talented young men to have their teams reach the final stages even at district level and their talent will remain hidden.
The problem with most coaches is that they want to incorporate into their respective teams players who have already been perfected, and it becomes difficult in the case where no one is willing to perfect them.
Another problem is that most coaches are satisfied with the squads they have because most football players have the tendency of taking some years off their real age such that a 35-year-old footballer will comfortably claim that he is 25. And in this case coaches are also comfortable with the players they have, thinking that they will be able to perfect them only to be frustrated by the footballers’ instantaneous retirements.
In Malawi, it is possible for a football player who was 25 years old last year to retire the following year due to old age and one wonders where the other years to come up with the ‘old age’ have come from. Thus, it is important for coaches to ‘guess’ the real ages of their players so that they can go about searching for the younger talent as they expect the older ones to retire soon.
During the last World Cup tournament, Ghana had one of the youngest squads in the competition and they showed that they had a lot of talent. Perhaps this was in virtue of the fact that when younger men are employed on the field, they work extra hard so that they should establish themselves in the team.
Above everything, identifying hidden talent is one thing that does not usually happen in Malawi. Low-level tournaments that take place in remote areas of this country can provide a very suitable base for talent identification.
Malawi is not a country without talent in terms of football. We have a lot of young men in the remote areas who can transform football in this country; they only need to be identified.
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