Baptism of fire for Young Africans’ Zambian coach

Dar es Salaam. Zambian technician George Lwandamina was off to a bad start as Young Africans’ head coach yesterday after his side succumbed to a shock 0-2 defeat at the hands of an energetic JKU (Zanzibar) in a friendly played at the Uhuru Stadium.

This was the first real test off the training pitch for Lwandamina who took charge of the reigning champions’ technical bench two weeks ago.

Dutch technician, Hans Van Pluijm, is now the team’s technical bench director.

Apart from Lwandamina, Young Africans also featured, for the first on its technical bench, Zambian Noel Mwandila and Juma Mwambusi.

The encounter saw the Jangwani Street boys fielding ‘two’ teams in the ‘free-for-all’ friendly against the Zanzibari army team.

The former Zesco United technician overhauled the team in the second half by taking out 10 players who started the encounter.

JKU started on the attack, giving Yanga defenders Nadir “Cannavaro” Haroub and his colleagues a hard time, though they cleared all the dangerous balls.

But the Isles army side had their breakthrough in the 12th through Emmanuel Martin, who converted a Mbaroull Chande corner kick.

Tthe Mainland side’s defenders seemed not to be stable. It was not long before Martin scored the second goal 15 minutes later following a pin point pass from Nassor Mattar.

Lwandamina decided to make the first changes by taking out Pato Ngonyani replacing him with Andrew “Dante’ Vincent.

However, the changes did not help the team much, and the newly-signed midfielder, Justin Zulu who substituted Saidi Juma, did little to change the situation.