Real champs "Bandari are surely the real league champs" writes Philip Onyango in the Daily Nation on Monday 27th May,2019, "I want to boast here that Bandari, who on Sunday sealed the second place in the log, are my 2018/2019 SportPesa Premier League champions". What is Philip's major contention? Well, they (Bandari) traveled the furthest to honour their league fixtures. He writes, "Bandari, at the furthest end of the country, had to travel over 1,000 kilometres week in week out for the congested fixtures which apart from claiming several players through injury as was the case just before the mid-season, also left the playing unit and technical bench fatigued. So, you see Philip thinks that the team that travels the longest distance to honour their fixtures should be the one that wins the title. Nowhere else in the world (Not even in Guatemala ) do we have such a system. But this is not even his major contention. He seems to agree with The Standard's ...

Gor Mahia is almost synonymous with dominance. It is not easy to find a parallel to this kind of domination in other African leagues. Only in Europe do we see it. But then again it is still diffirent because the domination of the likes of Juventus, Celtic, PSG, Real Madrid was/is build by huge amounts of finances. Gor Mahia's dominance on the other hand has been painstakingly slow, and has come about on sheer brilliance in management and a stroke of good luck. But Gor Mahia's dominance is boring. It is the kind of dominance that makes you want to puke. Even Gor Mahia fans are sick of it. They go into a match not wondering whether they'll win or not but by how many goals they'll win. Celebrations have become more or less a duty that has to be endured rather than something to be savoured and enjoyed. Encounters with their so called eternal rivals are so predictable you can almost tell by how many goals they're going to win. There was a time when the mere thought of ...

The art of reporting football in Kenya is as old as football itself. But if you have been reading the back pages in Kenyan Dailies you must be laughing yourself silly over what our reporters have to say. And they all sound the same, it is like one person wrote a template that everyone else has since adopted and their only work has been to do just a little twitching here and there and, voila! The level of misinformation and bias is also appalling, to say the least. Take for example an article by Celestine Olilo for the Daily Nation on Sunday May 19th, 2019 entitled "Kipkirui at the Double Sinks AFC Leopards". She starts, "The difference between regular continental tournament attendees and mere domestic league competitors was on clear display on Sunday at the Moi International Sports Center in Kasarani where Gor Mahia beat AFC Leopards 3-1 in their SportPesa Premier League match". Well, the only thing on clear display was Celestine's biased reporting. She red...

No matter how you look at it, 2016 was the worst year in Gor Mahia's recent history. To put it into perspective, consider the following facts: 2016 remains the only year since 2013 that Gor Mahia has failed to win the league tittle. It was also the first year since 2012 that Gor failed to reach the 60 point mark, let alone surpass it. It was the year Gor Mahia scored the least number of goals since 2013. It was the the only season Gor Mahia top goal scorer failed to get past the 10 goal mark for the season. The only question is, who orchestrated this massive failure? It was one little-known Brazilian going by the name Jose Marcelo Ferreira or "Ze Maria".  Jose Marcelo Fereira "Ze Maria" was the man hand picked by Ambrose Rachier to replace the hugely successful Frank Nuttal. Being a Brazilian by birth, many expected him to bring to Gor Mahia a brand of expansive attacking football spiced with intricate passing and flair that Brazilians are famed for. But w...

Lingala and Swahili are both in the Bantu group of languages spoken in East and Central Africa. Lingala is  spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R.C) where it serves as the lingua franca of the region. It is a common misconception that Lingala is spoken only in D.R.C. In fact, Lingala is also spoken in large parts of the Republic of the Congo, Angola and the Central African Republic. Swahili on the other hand is spoken mainly in East Africa and some parts of Southern Africa. This article aims to explore some etymological similarities between Lingala and Swahili words. Even though the similarity between these two languages is much broader and goes beyond the scope of this article (and includes phonological, syntax and etymological similarities), the face-value similarities is a good place to start our investigation. For example, the simple fact that these two languages fall in the same language group suggests a close relationship. Agai...