Decision to hire Stewart late in season was a gem

One fact of life our noisy neighbours and their loud mouth Tom Mboya Osanjo must learn to live with is that Ingwe will remain a force to reckon with not only in Kenya but far beyond our borders.

We may have performed way below our standards over the last two or so seasons but that shall never take away Ingwe’s rich history as one of the greatest soccer clubs in Africa, if not the world.

And one does not have to be a rocket scientist to know where the administrators of this great club went wrong leading to the mediocre performance over the last couple of years.

What is it that the current administration has done which was never done over the past seasons to explain the much improved performance we are all witnessing this season? It is all about planning.

I can bet with my life that the difference between this season and the previous seasons has to do with the hiring of coach Stewart Hall last November.

By hiring the guy with less than four games to the end of the season, the management gave him the opportunity to assess the quality in the team and identify its strengths and weaknesses in real game situations and not friendlies.

Having identified the strengths and weaknesses, Stewart had all the time to decide whom to release and whom to recruit long before the new season kicked off.

The mistake we made over the last couple of seasons is to recruit a new coach midstream. To hire a coach well into a new season amounted to setting him up for failure. It happened to the two Belgians, Luc Eymael and Ivan Minnaert. It also gave them plenty of excuses to give in the event of failure.

“I did not have a hand in the hiring of players so this is not my team,” Minnaert claimed in the wake of a string of bad results.

It meant that the new coach had the excuse to fire half the squad in the June transfer window and recruit “my” players.

By the time they gelled, Ingwe would have suffered another string of defeats leading to his sacking.

You don’t have to look far, it happened to Minnaert last year, and to Eymael much earlier.

It may have worked for the administrators who are known to make their money through this player transfer business but certainly not for the great Ingwe.

Coaches come and go as one Job Omino put it many years ago. So Stewart will one day go but when he does, I’ll remember him for leaving a youthful generation of players who will dominate football in this part of the world for many years to come.

This is the painful fact our noisy neighbors must learn to live with.