The tide has turned at the Mbaraki Sports Club.
Bandari FC, a club forever tied to the heartbeat of Mombasa’s seafront, have dismissed head coach Ken Odhiambo after a winless start to the 2025/26 Sportpesa Premier League.
His fate was sealed on Sunday evening when Shabana FC, the rising giants from Kisii, struck a lone dagger in a 1-0 defeat that left the Dockers stranded.
In his place, assistant coach John Baraza — once a striker who made defences tremble — has been handed the wheel, at least for now.
Football is a cruel tide. It lifts you when the winds are kind, it drowns you when the waters turn cold.
For Ken Odhiambo, the waters have been unforgiving. His Bandari side stumbled out of the blocks: a limp draw against Kariobangi Sharks, followed by a home defeat to Shabana. The Mbaraki terraces groaned, and the boardroom whispered. By dusk, the whispers had become a hammer blow.
The news was broken to the players immediately after the match. Some bowed their heads in quiet acceptance, others glanced nervously at each other. The writing had long been on the wall.
Odhiambo’s bond with Bandari has always been like a stormy love affair. This was his third stint with the Dockers — 2011 to 2015, 2019 to 2021, and now the curtain call of 2025. But this final chapter was clouded by mistrust.
Transfers were conducted without his nod, some signings revealed to him only through the glow of a phone screen. What trust survives when a coach sees his own squad unveiled on Facebook before the training pitch? The fracture grew. Authority slipped. Results betrayed him. The club’s official statement was respectful, yet final — as though sealing a ship in a bottle and setting it adrift.
“Bandari Football Club has, with immediate effect, appointed John Baraza as the Interim head coach. Baraza has been serving as the assistant head coach of the club and will now take charge of the team until a permanent head coach is appointed,” the statement read. “Bandari FC appreciates the former head coach, Ken Odhiambo, for his contribution to the team and wishes him success in his next role,” it concluded.
Words that close a chapter, yet leave the scent of salt in the air. Now, the ship belongs to Baraza. He once haunted defenders as a lethal striker for Sofapaka and Harambee Stars. He knows the weight of pressure, the loneliness of the penalty spot. And now, he must feel the weight of an entire city on his shoulders.
His reign may be temporary, but in football, an interim often bleeds into permanent if results sparkle. With Nairobi City Stars looming on the horizon and champions Kenya Police sharpening their claws, Baraza’s trial by fire begins now. Odhiambo’s last words as coach carried the melancholy of a sailor cursing the storm. He said: “It was an avoidable goal. We lost concentration and got punished. At this level, small mistakes cost you games.”
Perhaps those words were not just about Shabana’s strike, but about his entire Bandari journey — avoidable mistakes, punished dreams.
In Kenya, coaches rarely die on their swords; they are dragged away from the battlefield. Odhiambo is the first casualty of this season, but he will not be the last.
The Sportpesa Premier League is a furnace that spares no one. Fans of the Dockers cried out for the glory of 2019, when the team lifted the FKF Cup and flirted with the league crown. Today, their club lingers near the bottom of the standings, the sea threatening to swallow them whole.
Ken Odhiambo will not vanish into the depths. He has guided Harambee Stars as an assistant, and he has crafted young talent with a patient hand. Already, murmurs link him to struggling mid-table sides.
A coach with scars is a coach with wisdom — and in Kenyan football, wisdom is currency. Ken Odhiambo’s departure from Bandari is a reminder that football is not patient with sentiment. The sea may love you once, twice, even thrice, but when the tide turns, it turns. For the Dockers, hope now rests in the hands of John Baraza, a man stepping from the shadows into a storm.
For Odhiambo, this may be the end of a chapter, not the book. In Kenyan football, tomorrow always waits — with its knives, its roses, its endless tide.
