K'Ogalo Pundit: Gor Mahia is down ... but not out

Does Gor Mahia have a chance of winning the FKF Premier League this season? The club has faced a difficult start to the season but their Panglossian fans cling to belief that K’Ogalo can still march to the title. The more reasonable ones have however, resigned to the ever increasing possibility that K'Ogalo's four-year grip of the league title can no longer be sustained – at least going by sentiments on social media. One fan even thought that this would be the worst title defense in modern times.

Gor Mahia has so far lost six of its opening 13 matches, winning 6 and drawing one. Many hold the view that the team cannot possibly bounce back from such awful start, made worse title rivals getting off to a flyer. I decided to take a peek at history to see if we have ever made a worse start and still came back to win the title.

Gor Mahia generally win league titles by setting the pace and forcing challengers to cope with the stress of playing catch-up. 1983 seemed to be an oddity when the club got off to a poor start, struggling in the opening 5 games (losing 2 and drawing 1) before embarking on a run that saw them win the next 10 out of 12 games.

In 1991, they also struggled in the opening 12 games, making a return of 3 wins, 3 losses, and 6 draws but a strong finish, winning 8 wins out of the last 10 games ensured they managed to pip AFC Leopards and Kisumu Posta to the title.

In terms of title defense, if there’s a season to draw parallel with this one then one has to go back to 1996. After having pipped the Brewers to the title the previous year, Gor Mahia began their defense on the back of player unrest and financial challenges that saw them fail to win any of their first seven matches and eventually finish the season in 7th position, 21 points behind the eventual champions. This was their worst league performance to date.

Winning the league from the back of the queue is going to be a tall order for the defending champions, especially as they have been unable to take advantage of the games at hand that they had. When you add to Tusker’s fantastic run so far then apart from embarking on a long string of victories, they will have to hope that Tusker runs out of steam. The only time Tusker had a strong start like this and failed to win the league was in 2005.

But this is football and anything can happen…especially with Gor Mahia. We have not forgotten that magic run in 2012 when all had seemed lost at the beginning of the season but they must show it in the upcoming matches, starting with the game against Bidco United next week.