Listen The two biggest global sports events are the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics. Kenya has a diametrically different relationship with the two. It has never qualified for the World Cup but it is an athletics giant, which has returned sterling performances in the Olympic Games since 1956. The last Games in Rio de […]
Listen On a bright afternoon late in the 1982 season, Abdallah Shebe, in Feisal colours, spread such extensive mayhem in the Gor Mahia defence that scouts off the pitch had little difficulty deciding what to do with him: sign him. The next season, Shebe lined up in the olive green of Gor and happily raised […]
Listen The desire for a goal was all too evident. As early as the seventh minute, the hearts of AFC Leopards’ true believers missed a beat when Mahmoud Abbas dropped a ball and Leventis’ Oyo Oguanlana just chipped it over. Minutes later, Leopards’ Dan Musuku handed over the ball to Leventis goalkeeper Edward Ansah when […]
Listen Early in the 1970s, Bobby Ogolla chose a career which is religion to millions of people: Football. In the middle of the 1980s, he was mature enough to know that at a high point, a player can be transformed into a people’s savior, the saint to whom they take their intercessory pleas. At a […]
Listen We are on the top floor of Uniafric House along Koinange Street, Nairobi, in a sports club called Presha Engineering Company Gymnasium. It is late afternoon, 1986. Here, young men and women – and some not so young – work out with weights every day. Weight lifting. Weight training. Body building. Power lifting. […]
Listen One evening in 1980, a friend and I drove to the Kenya Breweries Tusker Village at Ruaraka to meet friends and gossip football over a beer as we watched the players training. The previous day, Breweries had beaten AFC Leopards in a tough league match at the City Stadium. The mood at the Village […]
Listen Kenya has produced many great strikers; Elijah Lidonde, William Chege Ouma and Joe Masiga immediately come to mind. But Dennis Oliech was Kenya’s first international football celebrity. He happened on the scene during the globalisation era, in the age of the internet. He certainly wasn’t our greatest striker, but he was a talent above […]
Listen The most illustrative episode about Kenneth Matiba’s attitude towards the players managed by his federation was the afternoon pep talk one day in March 1975 at the Jacaranda Hotel in Nairobi. The team was camped there in preparation for an African Nations qualifying game against Sudan. Matiba gathered the players in a room to […]
Listen Joe Kadenge stood in silence on the main stand of the Nairobi City Stadium. Lost in thought, he followed the paces of the young men who were going through their training out there in the field. He turned his head slowly, from one end of the pitch to the other. Once in a while, […]
Listen I was the sub-editor on duty at the Daily Nation sports desk one Sunday evening in the early 1980s. Reports of league matches were streaming in from stadiums across the country. The big match of the day in Nairobi was a Kenya Breweries versus AFC Leopards game. The photographer assigned to cover that match […]