Strikers eager to put their best foot forward

Ugandan football has not produced strikers in the calibre of former SC Villa striker Magid Musisi 

This past week the curtain came down on the first round of the 2015/16 Uganda Premier League season. Throughout the fifteen match-days, strikers have rang with new authority, gaining on defenders.

Glorying at the beauty of it all is in order if anything because the predatory fire of Ugandan strikers had cooled in the recent past.

Not many people are dimly aware of the fact that a certain Hesbon Mundia topped the scoring charts in the Ugandan topflight back in 2004.
Yes, Hesbon Mundia. His attention in and around the box was far from being microscopically fierce. That Mundia’s paltry thirteen goals landed the proverbial golden boot was such a travesty of goal scoring. To date, the return strikes one as grimly bizarre.

Mundia may have barely suppressed his enthusiasm back in 2004, but his feat was greeted with sad recognition. It was a nadir that showed all the more that Ugandan football’s problems in the final third were a tedious avalanche.

The following year, in 2005, a productive striking partnership between Geoffrey Massa and Martin Muwanga did more than propel Police FC to an unlikely league title.

It came exquisitely close to rekindling memories of a striking duo whose productivity was on an industrial scale.
Hassan Mubiru and Andrew Mukasa gave defenders such a dangerous initiation during their heyday. In 1999, they plundered a combined 65 league goals in the blue hue of SC Villa. It was an eye-popping number by any measure.

Mu-mu attack
Mubiru and Mukasa may have set the bar high, but they were exhibiting a scoring prowess that was not quite alien. Ugandan club football had a knack for churning devastating finishers.

This certainly was a description that befitted the likes of Majid Musisi and Mathias Kaweesa to mention but two. Yet when Mubiru and Mukasa passed on the baton, the illustrious past of strikers in the Ugandan topflight remained just that — a past. A relic.
With performances in the final third having tailed off, nondescript strikers with low returns increasingly found themselves ending up on the roll of honour for top scorers. Mundia was far from being a singularity.

The likes of Bruno Olobo added to an already disfigured landscape. Why was this the case? Striking is far from being a monstrous game of chance. Facets such as positioning discipline, anticipation and finishing make it anything but a coin toss.

There is of course a serendipity about getting goals at times, but for the most part striking is a polished art. Playing off the shoulder of the last defender and running the channels is something that is perfected.

To achieve this, cutting edge equipments like parabrakes are used to improve strikers’ burst of pace and stamina. Ugandan clubs have always thought such an approach not just avant-garde but also, remarkably, unnecessary.

A few moons back while watching a training session of Express FC players at their ancestral home in Wankulukuku, your columnist was astonished by its threadbare outlook.

The coaches overseeing the training session (Hassan Mubiru was one of them) looked out of depth.

This notwithstanding, Express’s strikers appear to have come into their element this season. Caesar Okhuti has managed eight goals at the halfway mark. URA FC’s Robert Ssentongo leads the way with nine goals.

While Ssentongo’s goals per game return of 0.6 is hardly prolific, it is a vast improvement from the dark days of Mundia and company (in the 2011/12 season, thirteen goals won Ssentongo the golden boot.