
Ray Bachelor was a football coach who became a sports officer for Coast province and later Rift Valley in the last days of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya.
His tenure as the Harambee Stars coach was one marked by drama, turbulence, and history that was not very positive in Kenyan football.
In one dramatic instance at the CECAFA Cup in Zanzibar, Harambee Stars players revolted and forcibly ejected him as their coach.
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Bachelor was the coach in charge when Kenya lost 13 - 0 to Ghana's Black Stars in 1965 which was, and remains, the worst and most embarrassing Harambee Stars performance, adding more woes to the Englishman.
Bachelor led Nakuru Allstars in scooping their first league title in 1964. As the Nakuru All Stars head coach, he also doubled up as the sports officer for the now-defunct Rift Valley province.
Despite the historic loss, it was not fair to blame Bachelor who had taken over as coach only four hours ahead of the 1965 match.
Bachelor's predecessor and Kenyan Peter Oronge left the team in dramatic style ahead of the match with Ghana, with the innocent Bachelor volunteering to take over unaware of the historic loss that was to go down.
It is suspected that Oronge left after receiving reports that the first President of Kenya, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, was to attend the match.
It has, however, never been established what problem Oronge had with the first Head of State that made him abandon the team unceremoniously.
Oronge had taken up the coaching job in 1963 making him the first Harambee Stars coach in independent Kenya after a successful career as a footballer in pre-independence Kenya.
The 1965 game, which saw Oronge make the infamous and unprecedented decision, was to celebrate Kenya's first anniversary as an independent country but turned out that there was nothing to celebrate about.