Zimbabwe National Football Team failed to depart for the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) finals in Gabon on Saturday morning as a stand-off over finances worsened.<\/p>\n
The Warriors refused to attend a send-off dinner on Friday night in Harare, with the country\u2019s acting President Emmerson Mnangagwa present at the function.<\/p>\n
Players are demanding payment of monies owed from the qualifiers, and they want a K3.8 million ($5, 000) appearance fee for each game that they play at the Nations Cup finals in Gabon.<\/p>\n
Zimbabwe Football Association (Zifa) is reportedly offering K1.9 million ($2,500) per game. The Daily Times <\/em>calculated basing on $1=K771.<\/p>\n The team was due to depart for Cameroon in the early hours of Saturday, with a friendly against the Indomitable Lions scheduled for Tuesday, but the players are still in Harare.<\/p>\n Warriors captain Willard Katsande told Star FM <\/em>Zimbabwe that despite the dispute, the team is not considering boycotting the tournament.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously we are going to play, but it\u2019s a matter of discussing, as we deserve better,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are not asking for much, we know what we want as a team, we submitted our proposal long back but nobody listened to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Zifa has issued a statement apologising \u201cto all football stakeholders in Zimbabwe and particularly to the acting President,\u201d adding that \u201cthe situation resulted in the team embarrassing the entire nation.\u201d<\/p>\n The statement also says that Zifa is committed to ensuring that the tournament is successful for Zimbabwe, but that the players\u2019 demands are not sustainable.<\/p>\n Zimbabwe have already had a troubled build-up to their Nations Cup preparations following a row over accommodation issues.<\/p>\n The Warriors begin their Africa Cup of Nations campaign with a game against Algeria on 15 January in Franceville.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zimbabwe National Football Team failed to depart for the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) finals in Gabon on Saturday morning as a stand-off over finances worsened. The Warriors refused to attend a send-off dinner on Friday night in Harare, with the country\u2019s acting President Emmerson Mnangagwa present at the function. Players are demanding payment of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":38671,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38667","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\/38667","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=38667"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38672,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38667\/revisions\/38672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}