Soccer fever has gripped much of South Africa but in Port Elizabeth the sport doesn’t rate that highly
SOCCER: Andy Capostagno and Mark Lamport-
PORT ELIZABETH has never seen anything like it and has been largely underwhelmed by the dubious honour of hosting Group D of the African Nations Cup. Football has been front and back page news in the Eastern Province Herald, but the locals have steadfastly ignored its existence.
This is something that goes deeper than poor crowd attendance at Boet Erasmus. The Eastern Province Rugby Union is used to poor crowd attendance at Boet Erasmus. Port Elizabeth is just not a footballing town.
This was brought home on Friday night and Saturday afternoon at the beach bar famous for being the site of James Small’s dust-up with a local, which caused him to be dropped from the tour to Wales, Scotland and Ireland 14 months
At eight o’clock on Friday evening the band began to play and only the hardened few had their faces turned to one of the two televisions showing the one-day international in East London. Then Paul Adams came on to bowl. Gogga’s mesmerising trickery gradually drew the crowd off the dance floor and the noise made when he took his second wicket was such that the band gave up the unequal struggle, put down their instruments and gathered round the TV with the rest of us.
The next day Bafana Bafana played Angola and the same bar could not have cared less. It took some persuasion to get a barman to put it on in the first place. The second set stayed resolutely tuned to M-Net which was repeating a grid-iron game, followed by the Five Nations match between England and France.
The myth that the whole nation was behind the boys had been exposed.
The upside of PE’s lack of interest in soccer is that world stars like Tony Yeboah and Abedi Pele Ayew can wander around unnoticed in the Friendly City.
This will come as a relief to the great Ghanaian pair, but one suspects that a few of the other, more anonymous players wouldn’t mind being mobbed by adoring fans now and then; for them it would be a new experience.
Pele and Yeboah are not short of a bob or two, but there are aspects of the Nations Cup that are clearly run on a shoestring. This was exemplified when Mozambique goalkeeper and captain Rui Alves took the field against the Ivory Coast wearing a white T-shirt, rather than the de rigueur amazing technicolour dream jerseys beloved of goalies the world over.
The reason for Alves’ dressing down was not to become clear until later in the day when a press photographer reported having seen the Mozambique side training around the pool at his hotel the previous day, dressed not in tracksuits, but in full match gear. Could it be that Mozambique are among the sides who cannot afford a change of strip and that Alves’ goalkeeping jersey was simply lost in the machinations of the hotel laundry?
Touring a foreign country as a professional sportsman is never as glamorous as it sounds and generally involves a treadmill of sleeping-eating-training-playing and somehow trying to keep busy within the confines of the hotel environment. Four-time African Nations Cup champions Ghana have resorted to two time- honoured methods of keeping boredom at bay: shopping and a fine system.
Ghana’s media liaison officer Henk Ferreira admits that the side were a little disorganised during their first week in Port Elizabeth, their base venue for Group D in the
“But now we’ve got a good system going and all the players know the timetable for eating, training, shopping trips and so on. If anyone is late for the team bus, they are fined R20 and all the money raised will go towards our celebratory party when we have won the tournament final on February 3!”
Word is that top of the late-for-the-bus league is Abedi Pele Ayew’s younger brother Kwame, who is probably the most laid-back member of the Ghana squad. Dreadlocked and a man with a keen eye for South African women, Ayew has so far only had to warm the reserve bench during the tournament — so one can’t really blame him for hunting out alternative
As for shopping, CDs top the list for the Ghanaian team. “Although most of the guys play in Europe, they are all keen to buy CDs out here,” says Ferreira. “They’re mainly into reggae, calypso music and mellow soul — none of them much care for Western pop music.”
And king of the CD buyers is midfielder Mallam Yahaya, who happens to have a collection of over 500 CDs back in Dortmund where he plays his club soccer.
For Ghana’s team captain Abedi Pele Ayew, being in South Africa with his team and attempting to win the African Nations’ Cup for a record fifth time means everything. But last Sunday night he wished he was somewhere else — back home in Italy playing for his club side Torino against Fiorentina.
Torino won the clash 3-1 but, according to his Ghana teammates, Pele spent the whole of the match, which was televised live on local television, sulking in the hotel lounge. Occasionally his curiosity got the better of him and he asked one of the Ghanaian players for a score update – but the versatile striker could not bring himself actually to watch the live soccer on TV.
Port Elizabeth has proved to be a relaxing base for the four teams in Group D: Ghana, Tunisia, the Ivory Coast and Mozambique. One or two of the players have complained that the city is perhaps too quiet, with the only guaranteed venue for a “rave” the beachfront nightclub Einsteins — as long as you are 23 or younger.
But a few tempers have frayed in Port Elizabeth, and it all came to a head in the Group D match on January 19 when Ghana beat Tunisia 2-1. Nasser Benhassine, the head of the Tunisian delegation, was banned from his team’s dressing room, from the soccer pitch and from the reserve bench for Tunisia’s next match after he used “abusive language to CAF officials and also to the match commissioner Godfried Ekue from Togo. And if that wasn’t enough, the entire Tunisian delegation was given “a serious warning” by CAF for their unsporting behaviour during the game.
On the Ghanaian side, big central defender Sam Johnson and substitute Felix Aboagye were both cautioned for “ungentlemanly conduct” after swearing at CAF officials during the same