He had a troubled couple of weeks in November. He was included in the Warriors squad for the Algeria double-header despite being unattached to any football club. The fans turbulent on him, as well as on the coach Zdravko Logarusic.

He was accused of being the one to have paid his way into the team as shown by the alleged WhatsApp chat with Wilson Mutekede but through all that, there is one man who stood by him- Lloyd ‘Lodza’ Chitembwe.

The press conference held at Cresta Hotel presented sports journalists with the chance to get some answers on various issues related to the Warriors ahead of the trip to Algiers and one of us (the Soccer24 family) asked Logarusic to justify the inclusion of Karuru in the squad despite the 31-year-old not having a club or being active in football.

The Croat’s answer was not convincing, but it was his assistant Chitembwe’s, which somewhat settled the matter.

“The idea behind including Ovidy is to assemble a team which we feel is good enough to give us what we expect and all these years I think he (Karuru) has played a very important part within the setup,” said Chitembwe.

“One thing that is indisputable about Ovidy is his qualities as a football player and the fact that he is unattached is neither here or there because the South African league is in infancy; they have played only two games. The boy is training and I’m sure he deserves a chance,” explained the Harare City coach.

Details leading to Karuru’s separation with both AmaZulu and Stellenbosch are still obscure but one thing which is interesting about the former Masvingo United man is that he always ends up finding a club in the South African top-flight, which maybe explains his quality as argued by Chitembwe.

The fact that he scored a brace against his former paymasters Kaizer Chiefs yesterday might, according to some, not mean anything, but is of paramount importance to note it might have done him some sort of favor in making people doubt his abilities.