Transfermalitis and drawmalitis plague Chiefs

Kaizer Motaung is no medical doctor, but he has given the correct diagnosis of the acute disease greedily ebbing away at his ailing Kaizer Chiefs.

This week, King Kaizer even roped in Medshield to his bouquet of sponsors to make sure he comes up with a punctilious prognosis of the problems besetting his beloved Amakhosi.

Drawmalitis - Chiefs have drawn 11, three less than the drawgons, Orlando Pirates - is not the cause of their incapacitation at the republic of Naturena.

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Transfermalitis is what has sucked the life out of Chiefs like a Dracula that has been desperate for blood for days on end. For the uninitiated, Transfermalitis is an ailment aligned to buying players who are free-transfer targets. These are guys who are contracted to no club or, as permitted by the Premier Soccer League rules, can sign pre-contracts with another club while serving the last six months of their contract at current employers.

In the last few years, Chiefs' activity in the marketplace has been characterised by austerity or a lack of luxury.

Don't get me wrong, there is inherently nothing wrong with signing players on a free transfer. In and of itself, it is a tactic that works like a charm when applied astutely. That's the operative word, astutely.

As a matter of fact, clubs like SuperSport United and Bidvest Wits, to name but two, have made astute acquisitions this way.

The trouble with Chiefs is they engage in the same tactic wrongly.

They tend to scrape the bottom of the barrel of the free-transfer market, picking up the worst targets whose minuscule contribution shall never be preserved for all posterity.

They brought on board Bongani Ndulula, Edward Manqele, Siphelele Mthembu without assessing whether the trio were what they needed.

They were more like sign-and-hope-it-works-out kinda signings.

Ndulula and Manqele have been jettisoned. Mthembu is still resident of Naturena republic not because he is required, but because nobody wanted to recruit him when he was deemed surplus to requirements.

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Where Chiefs have spent money to bring in a player on board like Siyanda Xulu, they have left him to rot on the bench or banished to the stands or get a run in the reserve league.

A bizarre claim was made last season that Xulu sold out the club by giving the tactics to Sundowns ahead of the Telkom Knockout final. It means he is deemed as the enemy from within. But Chiefs made peace with Itumeleng Khune and showed him love after a protracted salary standoff with the club. A thawing of relations with Xulu can contribute in shoring up a not-so-steady rearguard. From Zambia, via Mozambican club Clube Ferroviário de Maputo, came Lewis Macha.

After scoring a great header that helped Chiefs beat Pirates in the 2016 Carling Black Label Cup, the lanky lad from Livingstone boldly declared in an interview with this columnist: "Watch me score 20 goals". Chicken teeth have been seen many times more than those goals.

It is a credit to Chiefs that they were able to put themselves among the challengers for the title, their obvious shortcomings notwithstanding. It is they who undermined their campaign with senseless drawmalitis. While the fans feel hopeless as they believe Komphela is clueless, let me put it on the record that before Pirates won their first treble, Dutchman Ruud Krol had, like Komphela, gone two seasons without any silverware before the deluge of trophies in the third season.

Twitter: @bbkunplugged99