WHAT GOOD FACILITIES CAN DO: SportPesa All Stars have taste of Hull City’s infrastructure which they can only dream of having when back home for KPL duty

If cold weather was an invention, the person behind it must have hailed from Yorkshire, and specifically Kingston Upon Hull, in the United Kingdom.

This is the place where a select Kenyan football squad, SportPesa All Stars, has set up camp until Tuesday after playing against a select side from Hull City FC, an English Premier League club, on Monday.

The players, their handlers and a battery of journalists travelling with them got a taste of Yorkshire's cold weather on Thursday, when the team went for a training session at the Bishop Burton College, the home of Hull City FC Academy.

It was raining, windy and cold but All Stars went through their paces nonetheless. Even as journalists sought shelter in the team bus to stay away from the biting cold gnawing at their fingers, one thing that stuck in their minds was the high level of organisation exhibited by the club's administration.

For a start, most facilities at the academy cannot be compared to what any Kenyan football club has, or probably plans to have in future if the way they are run is anything to go by.

The academy has four dedicated high performance grass pitches, a full size pitch with artificial grass which enable it to be used in any weather, changing rooms, sports fitness centre with a fitness suite, a sports hall, an aerobics studio and physiotherapy rooms and classrooms and meeting rooms.

Such facilities might be considered basic by some EPL clubs swimming in billions of pounds, but for Kenyan clubs, they are unaffordable, and players have to make do with rudimentary equipment and medieval training regimen which eventually translate in to poor results, and keeps Kenyan football in a state of retrogress because management does little to improve the lot of players on and off the pitch.

The current back and forth between Football Kenya Federation and certain clubs over CAF club licensing regulations revolves around facilities and (management) structures that clubs such as Hull FC cannot even argue over because they are an integral part of their success, development and future.

While a club such as Hull City cannot even think about disregarding such regulations, in Kenya, proposals meant to bring order, and improve football in general are considered a distraction, a disruption to running of clubs which still want to produce players who compete in more advanced leagues by want to employ archaic (management) structures and even medieval training facilities.

Why are some clubs not ready to move with the times — where do they get the motivation to be averse to modernity? The problem it seems is bigger, and several factors at almost all levels of football management contribute to this sad state of affairs which threatens to keep, or has kept Kenyan football in a state of backwardness while other countries are developing and achieving their goals.

"The people who are in charge are not serious," says Patrick Naggi, an Elite CAF Coaching Instructor who is currently the Football Development Manager at SportPesa.

"They are not knowledgeable about sports management and also they are not in it to learn or to help, but just for themselves."

Naggi, who was once the technical director of Tanzania's Yanga Football Club says the problem starts at the top, and the lethargy cascades to the clubs which do not see the need for developing football even as they are always ready to take credit for any positive results.

He adds that eventually, this rot even affects the national team which cannot be successful if structures in clubs are not strong because clubs are the source of a national team's strength.

"Clubs need viable youth structures and the national team of the 80s which won the East and Central Africa Senior Challenge three years in a row was borne out of a strong youth development structure initiated by Kenneth Matiba, who was heading Kenya's football federation," Naggi says.

He says Matiba started centres of excellence at provincial levels and their effectiveness was felt across even at club level and led to Kenya Breweries (now Tusker) winning the East and Central Africa Club Championship two years in a row.

"The Gor Mahia squad that won the Mandela Cup in 1987 was from these centres of excellence and this just shows that good structures that identify and nurture the youth's talent can produce results."

So, where did the rain start beating Kenya? "These people aged, but by then, the management at the federation had also changed, and there was no continuity," he says, buttressing the fact that poor management and lack of passion at the federation also played a role in killing the collective spirit of Kenya's football.

"The youth programme paid off, but those who came after Matiba and Job Omino did not follow it up with as much passion and the momentum was lost, lethargy seeped in and affected football at several levels," he says.

"We went in to a comatose and we are just trying to come to, but people are still groggy, and some seem to be happy in that state and do not want to embrace change."

Naggi says for Kenya football to totally wake up, there has to be youth development structures, and they have to be embraced, and supported by clubs which will then feed the national team.

"The current office is trying to revive youth development, it might take long before the results are seen, because it takes around 12 years to develop a player to maturity, but the results will be seen," he says. "This is not anything new. FIFA always has money for development, but Kenya has always lacked the drive."

But he is quick to add that coaches will also have to up their game so to speak, and embrace newer tactical methodologies. "A coach is like a teacher, he has to read every day, but some of our coaches fear education and do not want to learn newer ways of improving their players lives off the pitch so that they can perform better on the pitch," he says.

Even as he urges coaches to do more, and employ more brain than brawn, he says even the federation, or those who plan fixtures need to understand the minds of coaches and should not destabilise their work flow.

"Our fixtures come in bits and pieces, and that makes it difficult for coaches to plan or destabilises the coaching process," he says. "When the league starts, a coach does not rest and draws a work plan for a whole season based on the fixtures and poor planning on the part of the federation affects such plans."

The point that Naggi is quietly making is that in Kenyan football, indiscipline exists, at all levels, on and off the pitch, in the players' dressing room and in the federation's boardroom, and unless disciplined is instilled in the minds of all stakeholders, not much will be achieved.

"Football is deeper than people think. It involves a lot of planning and discipline. It is like building a house, and that requires both mental and physical resources," he says, adding that you need both to succeed, but in Kenya, we want to give a little of both, or none of either, or too much of the other, but still expect to have a strong house.

It seems the house we will build through such a thought process will not even protect us from the cold weather, leave alone a select Hull City FC side comprising academy players.

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