STEVE Kwashi is late – and so is Shepherd Bwanya and Joe Mugabe. And, this year, the Green Machine are marking the 30th anniversary of their landmark championship winning season in 1996. It was their first league title in the era of Independence and it ended a lengthy 17-year wait for the league title.
The Green Machine also won the BP League Cup, the Charity Shield and the Independence Cup while Stewart Murisa was named Soccer Star of the Year. Alois Bunjira, whose season ended prematurely because of injury, finished as the runner-up in the Soccer Star of the Year race, losing by just a point. He won the Golden Boot with his 23 goals and was named the Kingsgate Premier Soccer League Player of the Season.
CAPS United lost only three games all season in the league and thrashed Hwange 6-1 and Lancashire Steel 5-0. For four straight years, between 1994 and 1997, the champions were either CAPS United (once) or Dynamos (three times). Now, none of the two Harare giants have won the title in a decade – the longest barren spell this has happened since the domestic top-light championship started in 1962.
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If both are looking for inspiration, to change the script, then they only have to borrow a leaf from their classic battle for honours in 1996. They swept all the silverware on offer, with Dynamos winning the Castle Cup, but they have both been struggling to match those high standards. While the Green Machine, rightly, gets all the plaudits for their landmark season, it appears DeMbare do not get the credit, which they deserve, for the way they fought that year.
They finished three points adrift of Makepepe in the championship race and that is largely due to one defining moment, during the course of the season, at Rufaro. Mphumelelo Dzowa’s screamer, probably the ‘Free-Kick Of The Deade,’ in Round 23 at Rufaro, which helped CAPS force a draw, proved the defining moment of the race.
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