Jimmy Kirunda, who died in Kampala on Monday this week, was one of those players who symbolise an era.
In his, Uganda football reached its highest point with the silver medal it won during the 1978 Africa Cup of Nations in Ghana.
He participated in five of that tournament’s qualification campaigns and played in three final rounds.
With the Cranes he won the Cecafa Challenge Cup in 1969, 1970, 1973, 1976 and 1977 and as manager he won it in 1989, 1990 and 1992.
You are really only as good as your peers think and being captain of the Uganda Cranes for 10 years as he was says enough about what the best players his country could produce thought about him.
In a continental sense, Kirunda was to Uganda what Stephen Keshi was to Nigeria, Charles Gyamfi to Ghana and Godfrey Chitalu to Zambia.
The list of these exceptional players is long and distinguished. These are players who are born as leaders.
They are the natural captains of their national teams whose reign is long and who go on to become successful managers and finally ride into the sunset as some of their nation’s most beloved public figures.
DISCIPLINED TO A FAULT
The hallmark of their careers is consistency and longevity. Typically, these are men of no drama on or off the pitch.
They are disciplined to a fault, are always available for duty and are rarely injured or even sick.
And it is news if they ever get into the referee’s book. We can’t imagine the team without them and in Kirunda’s case, I never saw him in Uganda’s familiar yellow and black kit without the captain’s armband. In Kenya, we would say these are the players who are forever there.
If you polled players of a certain generation of Kenyans, men like Mahmoud Abbas, Josephat Murila, Bobby Ogolla, Joe Masiga, Ambrose Ayoyi and Ellie Adero about which Ugandan players of their time they had the highest respect for, I am sure the name Jimmy Kirunda would consistently feature high in their answers.
Kirunda commanded the central defence space he occupied with a regal demeanour.
He was never in a hurry but his interventions were timely. Control was the name of his game and panic its opposite.
It must have felt very reassuring to be his team mate.
In victories and in defeat, Kirunda always seemed to be in control.
With this imminently unflappable defender, everything was going to be alright, regardless of the score line.
No wonder he has departed as Uganda’s most decorated Crane.
I first watched Kirunda in November 1982 during what my generation considers the most memorable match between Kenya and Uganda.
This was the final of that year’s Cecafa Challenge Cup. Kenya was going into that fixture as defending champion and Uganda came with a record of never having lost a final at home in 15 years.
The proceedings of that match are etched in the memory of every fan and every journalist who saw it.
Not only was it a meeting of two fearsomely competitive siblings, but it was also a clash of two very different captains.
Our Mahmoud Abbas was the charismatic, flamboyant, loud and extremely reliable man between the posts. Penalty takers approached him with nervousness.
Jimmy Kirunda was this big, calm, studious and unhurried commander who orchestrated proceedings from his perch at stopper.
Both captains had a panoramic view of the field before them and both pursued opposite tactics to try and win the match.
Kenya went into it with a rock solid defence and turned its lively attackers, Joe Masiga, Wilberforce Mulamba and Ambrose Ayoyi into opportunists. They knew Uganda, riding the wave of their fanatical supporters, would come at them in waves. Their job was to score on the counter attack.
And Uganda did play according to that script.
They went into that match to score and threw everything at Kenya.
Even Kirunda was at times foraging in Kenya’s half. It was during one such foray that Mulamba found space behind him and scored Kenya’s regulation time goal.
CRANES V HARAMBEE STARS
The match ended 1-1 and as history has adequately recorded, the final was settled on penalties.
Abbas did what the Cranes feared he would do: he stopped two spot-kicks and Kenya won 5-3.
It was one game in which if I wasn’t a Kenyan, I would have been Uganda’s biggest fan.
They didn’t deserve to lose, but a Cup has to go one way or the other after a final.
I didn’t interview Kirunda then, but I had a chat with him in October, 2011, in a Kampala hotel lobby before the Cranes versus Harambee Stars match in the final stretch towards the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations.
Uganda needed a simple win while Kenya were already out.
I am not sure there existed a single Ugandan who didn’t believe that the Cranes were finally returning to the big stage after a 34-year hiatus.
In the days leading up to the clash, Uganda’s rich and famous, led by President Yoweri Museveni, made a bee-line to Namboole, the Cranes’ training base, where they left wads of cash to the players. They pledged to give them more after beating Harambee Stars, an outcome that was being treated as done and dusted.
President Museveni gave them USh600 million (about Sh22 million.)
The number of fans who gathered to watch Cranes’ training sessions rivalled that seen at competitive internationals, with the stands packed to capacity.
All this made me fear for the Cranes. I thought they were dancing themselves to exhaustion before the main dance started.
During that encounter, Kirunda was the centre of national attention.
It was difficult to have a coherent conversation with him because everybody wanted a piece of the legend.
On my arrival in Kampala, the first thing I had done was to scan the papers and I found they had run lengthy interviews with him.
Now everybody in the teeming lobby seemed to want to have a word.
But there was still enough space for him to tell me that he was confident that finally the Cranes would be returning to the Nations Cup finals to where he had led them a generation ago.
Unlike his excited compatriots, his optimism was guarded and he expressed his respect for Kenya, as he doubtlessly did to all opponents.
We recalled 1982 and he said those were the best years of his life.
He ticked off the names of his old rivals and enquired how they were doing.
His life had obviously turned out alright and he accepted the adulation he received with both humility and a sense that it was well earned, a natural consequence to his long years of service.
I was touched by the people’s gratitude and respect for him.
But Jimmy Kirunda’s hopes for Gabon/Equatorial Guinea 2012 turned disastrous.
Kenya forced a 1-1 draw and went down the tubes with its hands clasped on its neighbour’s neck.
I have seen mourning after lost football matches but I have never seen anything like I saw then. I am not even sure I will again.
Please allow me to quote from a passage that I filed for this column on my return from Kampala: “The mourning that engulfed Kampala after they failed to beat Kenya could melt the heart of even the most hardened cynic.
“After the final whistle, a message was displayed on the score board reading: “Thank you boys. You played well and went down fighting. We still love Uganda Cranes.”
“Long after the game had ended, thousands of Ugandan fans stared at the scoreboard with tears flowing from their eyes.
“They were immobile. It was pure heartbreak. 33 million people had invested their happiness on those 22 players.
And, like in love, there was disappointment. And it was the kind of disappointment that defies speech.
“That night, Kampala was quiet. In my taxi on the way to Entebbe the following day, the driver told me: “Many Ugandans are crying”.
He was silent throughout the trip, but occasionally he would shake his head and mutter: “Uganda Cranes!”
The heavy rain pounding the road added to the gloom.
Inside the terminal, a lady staffer at Air Uganda almost broke my heart because I was wholly unprepared for the melancholy tone with which she asked me: “Why couldn’t you allow us to score even one goal?”
“As I got off the plane at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, a flight steward sarcastically asked me: “Where is your East African cooperation?” In different circumstances, I thought he could have driven his fist through my face.”
That dedicated East African patriot was, of course, suggesting that in the spirit of sisterly kinship, Kenya should have thrown the game since it was going nowhere anyway – a very serious crime in sport.
Fortunately, however bitter the outcome, our coach, Zedekiah “Zico” Otieno, was never going to go in that direction.
And he made that clear, albeit in language that was not sensitive to the immense suffering of his Ugandan victims.
As he sipped coffee in the Kenyan dressing room utterly unmoved by the pain he had inflicted on his listeners, Zico told the Sunday Vision: “I am not Father Christmas. I am sorry if they thought I am Santa Clause. We did not come here to do charity.”
Thus died Kirunda’s hopes.
But there is always a tomorrow.
The Cranes returned to the Nations Cup finals in 2017, after 39 years, and made it back-to-back last year in Egypt.
In life, he drew adoring crowds in their thousands to see him play.
In death, these crowds came to see him make his last journey. But the world has changed – it is under the grip of coronavirus, which dictates that only a limited number of people should gather in one place and that they must maintain a distance from one another.
But huge crowds came and police were forced to use teargas to disperse them.
That, in short, tells what a man who last played in 1984 and last managed the Cranes in 1996 meant to his people.
Jimmy Kirunda was buried in his ancestral home in Kyadondo, Uganda, on Wednesday.
He was 70.
