By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (September 4^th 2025)

Ambitions and Hope?

Kenya’s Harambee Stars know that their hopes of qualifying for the next World Cup are slim, but hope continues. Benni McCarthy, their coach, remains hopeful, but realistic. He believes that his squad have the talent to achieve the pinnacle for Kenya – play in a World Cup Finals.

“I know taking over, coming in here, it was already a couple of games in where you were starting on the back foot, so it’s impossible, but if not this one the next one,” McCarthy said. “2030 is around the corner, so, you know, we’ll be looking for 2030 too, so I’ll still be young enough and I’m sure skipper has plenty of muscle in that legs to last him for 2030 and then we’ll go again, but this is the one that we’re participating in, so we’ve got four qualification matches left and we want to get maximum points for every one of that and then we sit at the last game with our calculators out – maybe there’s a chance, so that’s what we’re hoping for.”

Nevertheless, it is a very tall order – the maximum they can get is 18 points, just three more than the second placed team in the group already have. They need to win all four remaining matches and hope for slip-ups above them.

Clinging to Hope

McCarthy cannot abandon hope while the slightest trace of a miracle occurring remains.

“As a coach, as a technical team, you have to be flexible,” McCarthy said. “You can’t just think it’s that way or the highway, so yeah, we adapt to what we have, you know, and that this moment in time, it’s exciting times because now you’ve got probably the best players in the country at your availability at the international stage and we’ve got a really, really strong and exciting team, so what you have at your disposal, you try and go for that and go for the jugular and that is every single game you play, you want to win, because I think the team – the squad – is good enough to win every match and probably even to get out of the group stages, but I started a year too late, so you’re already on the back foot, but so far extremely happy with the team that we have.”

Capable

The odds are against McCarthy being able to deliver qualification for the World Cup are very slim and the chance of qualification for the next AFCON has gone too. This means that despite the rekindling of national pride through the CHAN came too late. Consequently, the more realistic aim is targeting the 2027 AFCON which Kenya will co-host with its East-African neighbours Tanzania and Uganda. But McCarthy remains optimistic – he has to.

“We’re more than capable of winning every game – I hope so – and then continue on that path for the next big assignment that comes up in our way, which is probably the African Nations Cup where we will be the host and then we focus on getting the best available players for that camp and the best team that will give this country the same joy that we had when he had the CHAN boys here – no expectations but you excel beyond what people expected you [were] capable of because that’s the quality of players that this country has to offer and I think when it comes to them, the pool of players that we have will be far more greater than what we’ve had in the CHAN.”