Ntuthuko Maphumulo
“Every game that we play is about winning the three points, prestige and honour,” said Bafana Bafana coach Carlos Queiroz in announcing the squad to face Malawi this weekend in Durban.
Since taking over the squad late last year Queiroz has taken every game seriously and he’s not about to change that for the final World Cup qualifier, although the result is academic with South Africa having already booked their place in next year’s finals.
Queiroz hopes to get to the final 16 in the World Cup anything less will mean South African soccer has not improved since France ’98. The coach hopes to begin preparing for Korea and Japan with a few friendly matches.
The Malawi game is one the coach wants to win to allow the home fans to celebrate in style. The 1-1 draw with Burkina Faso that guaranteed qualification was held in Ougadougou. Victory would also preserve Queiroz’s unbeaten record in African Cup of Nations and World cup qualifiers.
The only surprise in this week’s squad was call-up of midfielder Doctor “16v” Khumalo who has been out of favour for two years. Queiroz said: “It’s a tribute to him, a great opportunity to celebrate our qualification and also a chance for him to earn his 50th cap.”
Bafana go into this first game against Malawi they play them again on July 21 in a Council of Southern African Football Associations (Cosafa) Cup clash with seven players who did duty in Burkina Faso.
Striker Benni McCarthy, who did not play in Ougadougou because he was involved in a Spanish Cup game for club side Celta Vigo, has been recalled.
Queiroz has made it clear recently that players who are not committed to the national squad will not feature in his plans.
Bafana Bafana won the first leg of the qualifier against Malawi 2-1 in Blantyre earlier in the year.
Malawi will be without their best midfielder, Ernest “Wire” Mtawali (formerly known as Chirwali), who retired from international soccer three months ago. But Mtawali warned Bafana not to underestimate Malawi because there will be youngsters wanting to prove a point to their coach.
Patrick Mabedi, who helped Kaizer Chiefs to successfully defend their kudu-horn cup in the Vodacom Challenge against Asante Kotoko last week and was named man of the match, will be hoping to help his country to victory against some of his clubmates this weekend.
Malawi have never qualified for the World Cup and have managed only a 1-1 draw against Burkina Faso among three defeats this time around. Their last World Cup qualifying game will be against Zimbabwe on July 28. The Malawians have also failed to make it to Mali next year.
Their only consolation is that they are still in the Cosafa Cup and they hope to beat Bafana to make it to the semifinals.
@IAAF jumps the gun
Athletics bosses are trying to speed up meetings, reports Martin Gillingham
Short of the men doing their bit in high heels and the women going topless, the powers that be can do whatever they like with the rules and regulations for shot-putting and the event will still be right up there with the world chess championships and pro-celebrity wallpapering as the dullest of spectator sports.
But that’s not quite how the track and field anoraks see it. To them the very real possibility of the sport’s world governing body, the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), reducing the number of putters’ attempts from six to four will be a move that changes the world as they know it.
What’s more it’s not only happening to the shot. All the throwers (javelin, hammer, discus and the shot) as well as the horizontal jumpers (the long and triple jump) will have their number of efforts cut by one third. And it doesn’t end there. Under the new proposals, the vertical jumpers will be eliminated after back-to-back, rather than three consecutive, failures.
It’s a proposal that has angered one of those most admired observers of the sport, Peter Matthews, who edits The International Track and Field Annual, the sport’s Wisden Almanack. “I am concerned at the misguided attacks on the traditional pattern of field events,” Matthews writes. “Every athletics fan I have spoken to deplores the suggestion from the IAAF that the number of attempts should be reduced from six to four and, even more so, that vertical jump attempts should be reduced from three to two.”
And it doesn’t stop in the field. The sprinters will no longer be allowed the luxury of one false start before risking elimination with a second. All the proposals are being adopted on an experimental basis in grand prix II meetings with a view to the IAAF congress voting on whether to implement them permanently at its meeting before next month’s world championships in Edmonton.
So why is the IAAF doing it?
The idea is to raise the stakes for the participants, heighten the drama and, in turn, shorten the meeting. All of which, of course, suits television. And in a world where sport is driven by dollars and viewing figures, television tends to get what it demands.
Track and field competes on a head-to-head basis with sports like Formula One and soccer.
It would be to over dramatise the problem to say track and field is in crisis. But it would be fair to say the sport is facing its toughest examination since the formal acknowledgment that it had turned professional.
The bold bid taken in 1991 by the late IAAF president Primo Nebiolo, to stage the world championships every two years instead of every fourth year, was heralded as a great success when Stuttgart hosted the first and best of those biennial championships in 1993.
But eight years later the IAAF’s showpiece has become a devalued currency. These days it’s rare for a lane at a top-flight grand prix meeting to be occupied by someone who hasn’t at some point in his or her career won a medal at either an indoor or outdoor world championships.
Also gone are many of the charismatic figures who made the sport in the Eighties and Nineties. The middle distances and the world record attempts that came with them were the centrepieces of big nights at tracks in Zurich, Oslo and Nice when records were traded between Coe and Ovett or Cram and Aouita.
World records have been broken in the sprints but however fast Maurice Greene runs he will never put bums on seats in the numbers that Carl Lewis once did. Without wishing to sound like an old buffer, athletics no longer has either the variety of characters it once had or the outstanding one-off meetings. These days it shares with cricket the scourge of meaningless one-day contests that apparently run one into another for 52 weeks in a year.