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Defending the Kenyan Premier League (KPL) title is not a cakewalk.
The big question is, why? Given the tiny concentration of power at the top end of Kenyan football, the rarity with which a club manages to retain the title is faintly bizarre.
Basic logic dictates that if you’re the best team in the country this year, then you stand a pretty good chance the next year, too. Yet when it comes to defending titles, Kenya’s top-flight creates its own logic.
Looking at the analogy of Kenyan artistes, we realise that success is one thing, sustained success is something else. Whether Kenyan musicians ‘lost their hunger’ after their first taste of table-topping glory, remains unconfirmed, but it’s certainly the default diagnosis for title-winning footballers.
It’s something former Harambee Stars coach Jacob Mulee hints at time and again: “Give a little bit more competitiveness to the squad, bring some new blood in, and put some players a little bit under pressure. So they know they have someone waiting. Now they’re the champions, a team needs that.”
This assumption that elite players will incline towards sloven complacency unless urged otherwise is a curious one, if not necessarily untrue. You’d imagine that if anyone is immune to mental shortfalls, it would be a squad of league winners, although perhaps not every top-level sportsman possesses the same ‘inner determination to avoid failure.’
K’Ogalo are struggling this season without an answer to their under-performance. They set the bar so high in the 2015 season by winning the title unbeaten — that anything less than that is failure.
It’s important to note that not many teams locally can sustain the pressure that K’Ogalo does from their own fans, media and corporates that are in partnership with them.
K’Ogalo’s 2015 unbeaten season came as a gift as well as a curse. Yes, success bred complacency. Too many people around the club have become intoxicated with the ‘unbeaten,’ it is undermining the club. Stakeholders are kidding themselves, talking big but not delivering.
Another problem is that everyone wants to beat Gor. Muhoroni Youth and Nzoia United did this in the KPL Top 8 final and GOtv Shield respectively.
Teams are up for it, they sit back behind the ball not to concede. Coach Ze Maria has lamented about this numerous times — that many teams don’t play openly against K’Ogalo.
Another thing: Gor Mahia’s regeneration exercise made the club’s December 2014 transfer business seem impossible to make any sense of K’Ogalo’s title win in 2014, for instance, was quickly followed by the signing of Boniface Oluoch, Ali Abondo, Karim Nzigyimana, Khalid Aucho, Collins Gattuso, Michael Olunga, and Meddy Kagere, an influx that not only hindered a number of regulars from getting overly comfortable in their first-team seats, but had tangible on-pitch effects.
Such influx of players wasn’t witnessed at the beginning of the 2016 season. Departures of Ali Abondo, Michael Olunga, Khalid Aucho (mid-season) and Meddy Kagere (later came back mid-season) were not replenished. But for all the talk of sated hunger, perhaps a more pertinent factor is outright exhaustion.
