Once admired Thika sink into oblivion after another big drop

Thika United was once touted as potential Kenyan Premier League winners. But how football is cruel.

The former exciting to watch club was on Sunday officially relegated from the National Su­per League to Division One, just one season after they bowed out of the top flight SportPesa Premier League.

For many years, the 19 year-old club won hearts of football enthusiasts with their abundance of young talents that have come through the club’s football academy and their beauti­ful pressing and passing game.

Some of Thika’s products include Harambee Stars quartet Michael Olunga, Francis Kahata, Dennis Odhiambo and Clifton Miheso.

Thika were demoted to the lower tie last season together with Wazito FC, but the later bounced back at the week­end af­ter lift­ing the league ti­tle at Camp Toyoyo in Nai­ro­bi.

Since in­cep­tion in 2000 before gain­ing pro­mo­tion to the Ken­yan Pre­mier League, Thika Unit­ed adopt­ed a model of signing tal­ent­ed school boys who went on to be­come big stars.

But the club start­ed fac­ing se­ri­ous chal­len­ges in hon­our­ing their NSL match­es due to fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties that emerged to­wards the end of last sea­son. Brook­side Dairy Lim­it­ed, that had been spon­soring the side for an es­ti­mat­ed Sh15 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly for 15 years, pulled out of the part­ner­ship at the end of the sea­son.

They could not find an­oth­er bene­fac­tor and as a re­sult the big name play­ers head­ed for the exit.

Speak­ing to Nation Sport before hon­our­ing their week­end fix­ture, Vin­cent Nyaberi, a mem­ber of the tech­nic­al bench point­ed at lack of qual­i­ty play­ers as the rea­son for their poor per­formance.

“We were forced to re­cruit young play­ers from lo­cal clubs since they were cheap to main­tain in terms of sal­a­ries com­pared to ex­peri­enced ones, but they were too young to com­pete ef­fect­ive­ly at this level,” he said.

Thika need­ed a win over visiting Ki­su­mu All Stars on Sun­day at Thika Stadium to guar­an­tee their sta­tus in the NSL but were in­stead trounced 7-1. by All Stars who earned an auto­matic slot in next year’s top league.