Willard Katsande has said escaping poverty was the motivation that fuelled his desire to represent the Warriors of Zimbabwe and spend more than 10 years at Kaizer Chiefs.

Katsande, who is winding down his successful career at DStv Premiership newcomers Sekhukhune United, said failure was not an option when he arrived in SA from Zimbabwe to join Ajax Cape Town in 2010.

After a brief spell with the now defunct Ajax Cape Town, Katsande moved to Chiefs the next season where he went on to have a successful career spanning more than a decade.

“Poverty motivated me,” said Katsande.

“I knew where I was coming from. It is not easy to stay in a shack, it is not easy not to have school fees and go to school barefoot and eat one meal a day. When I was not playing at the beginning of my career at Chiefs, I told myself to keep working.

“I think what helped me was that I managed to keep my circle very small. I was in that mess of not playing myself and the only person who was going to take me out of that situation was myself.

“If I started to get frustrated and went drinking or other wrong things outside football, I was going to lose even more because I get paid to train by Chiefs, and whether I played was the choice of the coach.

“I needed to train properly and I needed to respect the game. The one thing I have realised now that I am older is that you must treat the game well, and if you do that it will treat you good as well.

“When you are younger you get away with a lot of stuff like not sleeping enough and all that but those things will definitely catch up with you along the way when you get older.”

During his stay at Naturena, Katsande only won two league titles, the MTN8 and the Nedbank Cup under Stuart Baxter, and he agreed it should have been more.

“Talking as somebody who has been there at Chiefs, I need to be honest. The players gave their best at all times. Trust me, you work hard every day because playing for a big club like Chiefs is very demanding. 

“I don’t remember seeing any player going there and not giving their all. They always gave their all but sometimes they say success goes in circles. When success has visited your household, try to keep it as much as you can because when it goes away you don’t know how long it is going to take for it to come back.

“Success was at SuperSport, it went to Pirates and now it is at Sundowns. With Sundowns you can see  they are more jealous with it and that is why they are keeping it for this long.

“ We don’t know when they are going to get it again.  I feel like we were the unlucky [Chiefs] generation but we gave our all and it was just not enough.

“You could see we were at times so close but still so far getting runners-up medals. I don’t fault anyone and I can say  it wasn’t meant to be at that particular time. We have to be grateful for the opportunity we got to work for the big badge but life has to go on.”