Success in football, as in all sports, is a function of skill, application, self-belief and providence. For Friday’s third-round CAF Africa Champions Cup between South African champions Mamelodi Sundowns and Egypt’s Al-Ahly, no amount of divine intervention could be too great.
If it is a football dictum that the mark of champions is that they can play badly and still win, then the opposite should apply to the teams that get relegated. They can play well and still lose. Mamelodi Sundowns, in conquering a valiant Maritzburg United, proved the first point, while their luckless opponents testified to the other.
Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya speaks to Butana Komphela about transformation of the rugby field.
The late 1960s spawned contextual and black theology to ensure that the teachings of the dominant religion — Christianity — were responsive to the lives of black people during the era of apartheid. With apartheid officially dead, there is a vacuum in the lives of the faithful waiting to be filled.
Berti Vogts, Germany’s former coach now in charge of the Nigerian Super Eagles, once said that his enemies were so bent on criticising him, regardless of how his team performed, that if he walked on water they would probably accuse him of being unable to swim.
Bafana Bafana coach Carlos Alberto Parreira has talked tough ever since fielding his first media conference as the national coach. He shot from the lip, saying that he would quit on the first occasion he thought the bigwigs at the South African Football Association were not playing ball.
”Jacob Zuma is indeed a remarkable man. Witness his apparent political strategy. He has turned the effortless behaviour of keeping quiet while others say what they think into a political attribute. His supporters have not stopped telling us that he listens. This is part of the Zuma package — wisdom, humility, man of the people. One Who Listens,” writes Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
S’bu Mngadi, the newly appointed CEO of the South African Football Association’s commercial wing, says one of his friends went down on his knees and prayed for him on hearing he had accepted the job. Another offered to take up life assurance for him. If you did not know about the shenanigans that seem to follow the local game, you would think Mngadi’s friends were being a bit theatrical.
You might believe that existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre have nothing to do with the hazardous task of predicting the fortunes of football matches and football seasons. You would be wrong. For it was the French philosopher and Nobel laureate who observed: ”Things in football are complicated by the presence of the other team.”
Local football’s worst-kept secret finally came into the open with the appointment this week of Kostadin Papic as Kaizer Chiefs coach to replace Ernst Middendorp. In typical style, the club and the coach denied their public meetings while incumbent coach Middendorp was going through his worst period at Chiefs.