This is the month where Malawi sports has been exposed that it is the worst and most useless in this part of the region.<\/p>\n
As a bunch of Malawi athletes were embarassing themselves with a shoddy performance at the African Union Sports Council Region 5 Youth Games in Angola, the junior Flames were busy firing blanks in Rustenburg, South Africa at the Cosafa Youth Championship.<\/p>\n
The junior Flames had a hopeless performance- the worst in the history of the Cosafa Under-20 tournament- failing to score a goal in three games while their talentless brothers and sisters, who were masquerading as Team Malawi in Angola, could only manage seven medals, 20 behind leaders South Africa as of Wednesday this week.<\/p>\n
The look on their faces shows that it was bunch of athletes that did not prepare and they just set out on a journey to pocket allowances.<\/p>\n
Why should I sympathize with a bunch of athletes that has failed to survive the onslaught and ended up bringing shame to the nation?<\/p>\n
Their respective associations know that this country is not blessed with extravagant resources after thugs ransacked our coffers at Capital Hill, and yet they chose to participate in competitions without proper preparations.<\/p>\n
Much as I appreciate the notion by a few misguided sports analysts that junior athletes need to participate in these competitions for exposure but failing to score a goal in three competitive matches shows how tactically limited and na\u00efve our coaches were.<\/p>\n
In fact, I have chosen not to subscribe to this useless notion that junior teams should join international competitions to develop and that junior team coaches should not be given targets. This is a sick mentality that will eventually harm our youngsters.<\/p>\n
Our young athletes will grow up believing that losing is part of the game. This must be discouraged and the youngsters must be whipped left, right, and centre for such embarrassing defeats.<\/p>\n
Malawian teenagers must develop the Spartan spirit if our sport is to transform.<\/p>\n
As one football pundit in Europe put it: \u201cthe most successful individuals and teams in all walks of life are so good because they once tasted the sickly pit of defeat and sacrificed everything to find a way of never tasting it again.\u201d<\/p>\n
I do believe that Malawi has genuine raw talent but it is unfortunate that it is managed by quacks and upstarts. I mean visionless and tactless administrators who are in sports to champion their egos.<\/p>\n
I am afraid that if we do not change this mentality, we will end up joining competitions, spending fortunes and not developing winners but subconsciously encouraging losers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the month where Malawi sports has been exposed that it is the worst and most useless in this part of the region. As a bunch of Malawi athletes were embarassing themselves with a shoddy performance at the African Union Sports Council Region 5 Youth Games in Angola, the junior Flames were busy firing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37614"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37615,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37614\/revisions\/37615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}