Beach soccer spin doctors may credit former Manchester United striker Eric Cantona for helping spread the game around the globe, but the man doing that job in Durban last week during the African leg of the Fifa Beach Soccer World Cup qualifiers was, undoubtedly, Côte d’Ivoire’s Frederic Aka — without any pseudo-philosophical twaddle about seagulls, trawlers and sardines, thankfully.
While finalists Nigeria and winners Cameroon booked their November flights to Rio de Janeiro for the Fifa Beach Soccer World Cup finals, all eyes remained on Aka, who was voted player of a tournament that he illuminated with his mesmerising footwork and close control. The diminutive number 10 has more step-overs than an obsessive compulsive with an aversion for pavement cracks walking down Point Road.
In the tournament opener against Morocco, Aka inspired his side to claw their way back from an initial three-goal deficit to an eventual 8-7 extra-time victory, scoring two and creating two more. At the end, the 2 000-strong capacity crowd was honking vuvuzelas and chanting his name like a flock of randy hadedas.
Many — including one fan with a placard that read: ”Aka 4 Pirates. Please Bra Khoza” — returned the following day for Côte d’Ivoire’s match against Cameroon where he again scored a brace in a 4-4 draw that went to penalties.
The Ivorians eventually won the sudden-death shoot-out 1-0 to top the three-team Group B and ensure a semifinal meeting with Nigeria, which they lost on penalties after a 5-5 draw. And that particular Pirates fan may be further disappointed after Aka confirmed that his performances had attracted interest from three Premier Soccer League clubs, including champions Mamelodi Sundowns.
The Indomitable Lions of Cameroon, meanwhile, lived up to their moniker with a stirring, iron-man approach to the game, sometimes quite literally — with half their squad stuck in Yaounde because of visa problems, Cameroon’s substitutes’ bench against Côte d’Ivoire was as empty as a football agent’s promise. Luckily the full squad arrived in time for a 5-3 victory over Morocco and a 4-3 semifinal win over the fancied Egyptians.
Cameroon coach Joseph Antoine-Bell, the legendary goalkeeper who represented his country at the 1990 Italia World Cup, said that his charges’ tournament victory was due to adapting to a different footballing philosophy for beach soccer.
He had been training with his team, made up of professional players from Cameroon’s second division, for five weeks before the tournament started, but that because of the visa problems, half the Cameroon team was new to him, and each other.
With a five-a-side format on a sandy pitch and a game broken into three 12-minute periods, essential requirements for the game include barrel-chested stamina, exquisite balance, the acrobatic ability of a double-jointed gymnast and good control — and that’s just for the ubiquitous bikini-clad ”beach babes” gyrating to migraine-inducing Eurotrash techno.
While lack of preparation may not have hindered Cameroon, it certainly did a South African team captained by ex-Bafana Bafana striker Mark Williams and featuring Mark Fish, another veteran from the 1996 African Nations Cup-winning team.
The team dubbed themselves Banana Banana and proceeded to slip up by losing both group games: 3-4 to Egypt and an entertaining 7-6 loss to Nigeria that saw Williams produce a Herculean effort with five goals to drag his side back from 4-0, 5-1 and 6-2 down to draw level before losing by the solitary extra-time goal.
Fish may have been a little battered by the rigours of the tournament because he didn’t pitch for the inconsequential 5th/6th place play-off on Saturday, which his team actually won, 5-4. ”I don’t know where Fish is, maybe he is sick but he hasn’t called me,” said South Africa coach Marcelo Mendez after the match.
The South African team, which has been training together for the past two weeks, was a mixture of former professionals like Fish, Williams and ex-Jomo Cosmos player Brian Sebapole, and youngsters from amateur leagues selected after trials last month.
Both Mendez and South Africa Football Association (Safa) director of football development Zola Dunywa admitted that the national body’s involvement in the team was minimal, with marketing company G3 contracting Mendez, assisting with travelling and accommodation expenses for the team and contracting four Brazilian development coaches to teach the sport in KwaZulu-Natal.
Another under-prepared team, another missed opportunity by Safa to showcase and publicise South African football in the build-up to the 2010 World Cup on home soil? Looks that way.