The just-concluded Council for East and Central Africa Football Association (Cecafa) Senior Challenge Cup held in Kenya was largely successful.
Matches were played as programmed and the tournament was largely incident-free, save for poor turn out at the stadiums, a thing Cecafa Secretary General Nicholas Musonye took issue with. Musonye decried the poor match attendance, saying Kenyans are not genuine fans and only gossip about football over beer in pubs.
But Musonye’s comments were not misplaced, given that the regional event has not come to Kenya in 14 years and when it finally did this year, Kenyans kept away, making the regional body incur untold losses. This was a sharp contrast to the regional club championships held in Khartoum and Juba early in the year, when Sudanese nationals turned out to witness what was arguably the region’s best staged tournament in recent times.
Sadly, this was happening after Cecafa chiefs had allowed fans to use a single ticket for two matches. That the best-attended match was a crowd of about 5,000 fans at Nyayo National Stadium when Kenya took on Uganda is nothing to write home about.
From then on, local fans avoided match venues even as the home side went on to lose 1- 0 to Uganda and eventually leave the competition. The national team’s poor run in international football and Cecafa in particular has led to disillusionment among fans, hence the empty stadium seats. Cecafa chiefs did well to take matches to Mumias.
Football is an investment and fans should be ready to meet their part of the bargain if organisers are to stage successful tournaments.
