Don’t be fooled into thinking soccer is just a game
I have to confess that I don’t know much about sport. I was actually thrown out of the three-legged race in primary school for persistently trying to let my partner do all the running. It went downwards from there.
Apart from a fleeting interest in the hula hoop and an English playground game called “kiss-chase” in the early 1960s (both pursuits loosely linked to a dawning interest in girls) I have generally failed to grasp the fascination of all forms of sport.
Not so my fellow South Africans. The fortunes of Bafana Bafana, Amabokoboko, the Blue Bulls and Sean Pollock’s AmaKrikiKriki seem to be a matter of life and death around here.
Soccer fans are the worst. When they are not stampeding over each others’ bodies in a vain attempt to get into an overcrowded stadium, they are baying for blood while staring obsessively at a passive television set. And when it comes to the national team playing in the African Cup of Nations, South Africa’s peculiar brand of black-on-black xenophobia is elevated to a popular art form.
How can you be xenophobic about foreigners when they’re not even in your country? Well, South African soccer fans can. Makwerekwere‘s just don’t have the right to beat us, whether at home or abroad. And if they do, somebody’s head must roll.
Carlos Queiroz is what you might call an honorary makwerekwere, meaning that, even though he is white, an excellent coach with a brilliant track record in his native Portugal, and a man who has gone well beyond the call of duty to try to make South Africa a winning side, he is still a foreigner, and therefore permanently under suspicion of having come here to take a job that a local person could have done much better.
Not surprisingly, it is Queiroz’s head that Bafana Bafana’s armchair tactical experts now wish to see rolling into the sawdust.
What exactly has he done, as coach of the national side, to earn this judgement? Well, it’s hard for a layman to put a finger on it. But apparently it goes something like this:
First of all, during the build up to the African Cup tournament, he made the fatal error of asking all the members of the team to show up for practice. Although this is what a coach is partly contracted to do, the players themselves took exception.
Team captain Sean Bartlett sent angry messages from his current home base at Charlton Athletic saying that he had far more important business to attend to than playing on some third-rate, packed-earth soccer pitch in the middle of the Sahara desert. He wanted to ensure that his new owners wouldn’t forget about him when it came to selection, and so preferred to stay in London, hoping to catch the eye of the Charlton coach. Finally, where the hell was Mali, anyway?
It was only when the Fifa lawyers pointed out to him that he would no longer be eligible to play glamorous European football if he refused to make himself available to his national team that he belatedly agreed to fly home for training.
Other players found other excuses. The result was a late start to practice, with Queiroz valiantly striving to nurture a sense of team spirit in a sullen and reluctant crowd of money-hungry ball kickers who didn’t want to go to Africa.
When they did get to Africa (it could have been Mali or Malawi, for all they cared) the lack of passion and common purpose stuck out like a sore thumb. With typical South African swagger, they thought they could ride roughshod over their grigamba adversaries and maybe even get back home to South Africa before the commercial break. How wrong they were. In their first two matches they suffered goalless draws.
The fans and the mass media back home showed their disgust by calling for the public castration of every member of the team, their immediate repatriation without medical treatment, and the permanent deportation of their porra coach.
Queiroz, meanwhile, was trying to keep a cool head. He stayed at his post on the touchline, coaxing, cajoling and cursing his wayward flock into some kind of order. His strategy paid off with a decent victory against the couscous-eating Moroccans.
The newspapers then carried banner headlines screaming “We told you so!” A loose coalition of trade unionists, teachers, bus drivers, businesspeople and nurses marched on the Union Buildings to demand that the country’s highest national honour, in solid gold, be conferred on Comrade Brother Queiroz.
A couple of days later, however, the now over-confident Bafana boys got their collective ass kicked by the host team, to the tune of two goals to nothing. The South Africans, having publicly sneered at the Malians’ feeble defence before the match (based on deep, patriotic analysis by fired former coach and English-makwerekwere Clive Barker) found that the Eagles wouldn’t even let them into the game.
And so home they flew in disgrace. The Union Buildings were inundated with faxes demanding the withdrawal of Queiroz’s work permit, the immediate detention of his family and the seizure of all his assets, both here and in Portugal.
My cousin William tells me that I am too harsh on the reaction of South Africa’s disappointed fans. I don’t understand sport anyway, he is quick to remind me.
He also points out that things are worse in other African countries. For example, the entire Côte d’Ivoire squad was detained and tortured in a remote army camp after they were defeated in the last African Cup. Liberia took the radical step of dismantling its soccer federation after this year’s debacle in Mali. At least in South Africa we still have a soccer federation.
What business was it of mine, anyway? I am a sports agnostic, a heretic in conflict with the national religion.
Outnumbered and outgunned, like an early Christian in the Roman arena, the only safe policy was to keep my mouth shut and try to stay out of the way. I zipped my lip and went back to my Shakespeare.
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