When the Premier Soccer League (PSL) and sponsors Telkom came up with the slogan ”It’s a whole new ball game” for South Africa’s richest soccer tournament, it could hardly have been on the premise that the final of the Telkom Knockout would emerge as a crowd-pulling white elephant.
And it will indeed be ”a whole new ball game” when Silver Stars take on Ajax Cape Town for a record R4,25-million winners’ prize at Atteridgeville’s Super Stadium on Saturday December 16 — with the PSL clearly at their wits’ end to muster an attendance befitting the occasion.
The venue for the Knockout Final was announced by PSL general manager Andrew Dipela on Monday — and demonstrates the peculiar paradox that exists in South African soccer whereby a major final is being shunned by the public at large and shunted to a relatively obscure venue, while a Premier League game between two current also-rans, namely Kaizer Chiefs in seventh position and Orlando Pirates placed 14th is expected to draw its perennially huge crowd to FNB Stadium on Saturday afternoon.
And this is in no way an indictment on valiant Ajax and surprise, Cinderella-like PSL leaders Silver Stars either, with both these clubs being deserving finalists for the richest prize in South African soccer after navigating their way through difficult courses to enter the final.
Instead, it reflects the peculiarities of local soccer followers, who have been overwhelmingly herded, on a nationwide basis, into the corrals of Chiefs and Pirates over the years.
The trend is unknown in soccer worldwide where supporters, by and large, avidly follow and support the clubs in their own areas. Not so in South Africa where Chiefs outdraw their opponents no matter where the game is played in the country.
It is an aberration that promises to be a problem for South Africa’s World Cup organising committee as well in 2010 when attendances at games between the less glamorous nations might be shunned in the same way as the Telkom Knockout final between Ajax and Silver Stars.
Present circumstances, no doubt, will dilute to some degree the attendance at FNB Stadium on Saturday for the Soweto derby, while the organisers are working frantically to tempt spectators to the Super Stadium for the Telkom Knockout final.
But the underlying anomaly and problem, which will ultimately be exposed, should not be brushed under the carpet and ignored like an ostrich burying its head in the ground. — Sapa