Huge price tags and high expectations in football are as common as snow in the winter. Players who find these millstones strung around their necks can testify to how difficult it is to live with it. Some, however, do manage to swing it, coming out looking like a million stars.
Zambian international Lazarus Kambole hasn’t learnt the ropes and has tethered on an uneven balance with Kaizer Chiefs. For a man who scored the fastest hat-trick in the history of the CAF Champions League, it’s hard to swallow his current predicament.
He was instrumental to Zesco’s run to the semifinal of the CAF Champions League, but at the Amakhosi, he barely gets a look in these days.
He was brought on with seconds to go in the final of the CAF Champions League against Al Ahly. With the match already won and lost, he barely touched the ball before the final whistle.
The present player is not the Kambole of five years ago. The Kambole that Zesco know is the one that terrorizes defences. Chiefs seem to have a ‘fake replica’ of the real Kambole.
Maybe Chiefs got him without the operating manual, but Zesco has it, and their new coach wants to offer him another opportunity to get his career back on track.
“Of course, he has struggled to settle down in South Africa,” Zesco’s tactician said.
“I think this is something that we are looking at.”
“If it can be possible, we have a chat with his employers that side so that maybe we can bring him so that we can resuscitate his career,” Numba said. “I think him not having game time that side is not good for a player of his calibre.
“I think he needs to be playing week in week out so that he can be at his best that as it is now, he is not having too much game time, which has affected his performance that is why his performance seems to have gone down. It sure looks like Kambole needs a change of scenes to revitalize his career. Maybe a return to Zesco would bring the spark back. The Amakhosi experiment is not working, certainly not with one goal in 40 games since 2019. It would be best for Chiefs to try and recoup some of that R3-million transfer on the 27-year-old.