MZILIKAZI High School, the 2016 champions of the Orap Zenzele Chevrolet Champions Cup have been denied as opportunity to defend the boys title they won last year since are not part of the fourth edition of Under-20 football tournament at Gifford on Friday and Saturday.

Fourteen teams, eight boys and six girls drawn from Bulawayo, Matabeleland North as well as Matabeleland South will battle to be crowned the best over the two days. The boys schools are Gifford of Bulawayo, three are from Matabeleland North, these being Mosi-oa-tunya, Fatima, Tsholotsho, the Matabeleland South trio of Mzingwane, St Anna, Phakamani while from Midlands there is Sibomvu.

For the girls, Magwegwe are representing Bulawayo, Matabeleland are sending Pashu and Mosi-oa-tunya, three schools are coming from Matabeleland South and these are Bulu, Mzimuni as well as Usher.

A round robin format will be used where the boys and girls schools get drawn into two group, with the semifinals for those to be played on the first day. The finals for the boys and the girls will be played one after the other on Saturday to allow the teams to find their way back to their respective provinces.

Orap chief finance officer, Bryton Malandule pointed out that since their organisation is about empowering rural communities, they try not to make the competition a Bulawayo tournament.It appears with the tournament also being an invitational one, the sponsors used their discretion not to include Mzilikazi. 

“We try not to make this tournament not a Bulawayo thing, Orap is a rural based organisation, and we are trying to give a lot of exposure to a lot of schools that are coming from the rural areas. It’s just unfortunate, we would have loved Mzilikazi to come and defend the tournament as the guys that won it last year but you would appreciate that Gifford being the host school they are the ones that are representing Bulawayo so we couldn’t leave them out,’’ said Malandule.

Mzilikazi were the boys champions last year with Sobukhazi taking the girls honours. Sobukhazi have also been excluded from this year's tournament.  

@Mdawini_29