A quick note, this is a cricket blog, where we write about cricket. However, Mohammed Aamer has had his ode ruined by Stu Broad and Jonathan Trott so, instead, this is a piece about football in South Africa and the battles we face to live up to our ‘rainbow nation image’.
Historical moments in South African sport have a funny way of creeping up amidst pivotal moments in our country. Winning the rugby World Cup in 1995 right after the abolishment of apartheid and, more recently, hosting the Soccer World Cup shortly after a right-wing leader was brutally murdered and his minions were threatening anarchy.
South Africa is currently being stifled by a civil servant strike that has led to people dying because of nurses refusing to do their jobs while matric students have had their preliminary exams postponed because of teachers are demanding a wage increase of 8.6%.
All this while one of the biggest labour unions in the country have said that they will no longer support the ruling party in the forthcoming elections. Many believe that, should the ANC lose power, these same striking workers could very well take the rules into their own hands and send South Africa down the drain.
It’s no surprise then, that Friday, August 27 yielded yet another historic sporting event: a night of local soccer at the Cape Town World Cup stadium.
While the PSL has been going for years and local derby matches have been drawing record crowds for decades, never before has it been played in a stadium like this with such a large hype surrounding in. From Constantia private school kids right to the ordinary men from the townships, it seemed as if though everybody was excited by the game.
The vibe on the way to the stadium brought back nostalgic World Cup memories of Siphiwe Tshablala’s wonder strike against Mexico in the opening game to Luis Suarez’s ‘heroic’ moment which sent Ghana packing.
The only thing that had changed at the stadium were the few thousand seats that had been ripped out to make room for more executive box suites and the thick layers of dust which had gathered on most of the under cover chairs but everything else was just as the Dutch and Uruguay had left it.
The crowd at the stadium started off rather subdued and, aside from a few passion Celtic fans leading the choir in the R40 seats behind the goal, those feelings of unity and ubuntu that had been there throughout the World Cup seemed nothing but a distant memory.
For some, the seating arrangements were unfathomable. Despite blocks and seats being allocated and printed on tickets, everybody proceeded to sit wherever the hell they want resulting in many people getting to their seats rather frustrated and needing police and security to intervene.
Next to me was a very drunk, very passionate Pirates supporter who talked my ear off and, while he repeated the same sentence about 10 times in five minutes he was rather taken by my love for and knowledge of Itumeleng Khune.
He could not quite comprehend how a white suburban girl could know anything about what had, for years, been seen as the ‘black man’s’ sport. When I told him I watched Khune make his debut for Chiefs in 2007 and that I knew he was actually a defender and not a keeper.
His eyes lit up and he said that I had made him very ‘happy’ and even ‘proud’ because he can now rest easy knowing that we really are all starting to become ‘the same’. He was fascinated by the fact that me, a white girl had a fondess of what has, for years, traditionally been known as the ‘poor man’s sport’.
My new would-be friend was eventually chucked out of the seat he had ‘stolen’. We shook hands and nodded in accordance with humane greeting.
Newly promoted Vasco da Gama lost the opening match to Pirates 2-1 but the football was the last thing on my mind.
For the second set of matches, I had the pleasure of sitting next to yet another drunk supporter. A Kaizer Chiefs fan this time. I quizzed him as to why he supported Chiefs and what he said gave me a bit of a shock.
“I cannot support any Cape Town club because Cape Town clubs are all racist. It’s only the whites and the coloureds that play for them. None of the blacks.”
When told him that, actually Ajax have quite a number of blacks, about eight or nine from the top of my head, he retorted with: “but they are not from Cape Town. These Cape Town clubs, they must take players from Gugulethu and Nyanga and all the other townships because otherwise this does not represent our country. They must have eight black players in the team at least.”
Did I miss the part where being white or coloured made us non-representative of South Africa?
He kept on insisting that he is definitely not racist but all the Cape Town clubs are and to understand his thinking, you must understand soccer.
I might not be an expert but I have a fair understanding of the game. And I do understand that, for so many years soccer has been ‘their’ game, rugby and cricket have been ‘ours’ but that exact them and ours thinking is what has been the biggest issue in this country for so many years and until those divides are smashed, burnt and buried in across the board, from our sport right to the way he live and work, we’ve got a long, long way to go.