By Peter Alegi | March 18th, 2010 | 1 Comment
An African club is the first to enter into a formal partnership with the Professional Football Players Observatory in Switzerland. ASEC MIMOSAS of Abidjan (Ivory Coast) — a powerhouse of West Africa and past winner of the CAF Champions League — will work with the PFPO to identify leagues and clubs that offer the best career opportunities for young Ivorians trained at ASEC’s well-known MimoSifcom Academy. According to PFPO, Ivory Coast supplies the largest number of players to Europe’s Big 5 leagues. Is this latest collaboration a mutually beneficial deal or a form of neo-colonialism?
By Peter Alegi | March 12th, 2010 | 3 Comments
Thabo Dladla is a highly committed youth coach and former professional player with AmaZulu FC. His weekly ‘Talking Football’ column in a Pietermaritzburg newspaper focuses on the game at the grassroots, not on the 2010 World Cup or the PSL. ‘There is something wrong when a country with over 48 million people and a huge football budget cannot produce good players,’ writes Dladla this week.
‘I still believe that our country has some of the best talent at U12 level but poor leadership is letting the youth down. We have too many politicians and sports leaders who are more interested in the benefits that can be gained for themselves, than the sport itself.
‘Post 2010 South African youth deserve better than what they are getting now. The transformation of football should be felt at the lowest of levels. We can no longer allow a situation where a few get fatter while the players continue to suffer.’
By Peter Alegi | February 20th, 2010 | 2 Comments
FIFA General Secretary Jerome Valcke revealed that tickets prices for South African residents will be slashed to ensure that all World Cup matches will be ’sold out’. Thousands of Category 2 and 3 tickets will be sold at Category 4 prices — twenty US dollars — although details on sales have not yet been released. This announcement came on the heels of news that FIFA expects to make a marginal loss on the tournament. Valcke placed part of the blame on airlines and travel agencies for overcharging foreign football tourists. In South Africa, however, FIFA’s byzantine ticketing process — heavily reliant on internet-based credit card sales — has been criticized. Others say Bafana Bafana’s mediocrity has not helped and that even the lower ticket prices are beyond the reach of most ordinary South Africans.
By Peter Alegi | February 2nd, 2010 | 2 Comments
The Confederation of African Football (CAF) banned Togo from the next two African Nations Cup tournaments and also imposed a $50,000 fine. “This decision is outrageous,” said Togo captain and Manchester City striker Emmanuel Adebayor to the French newspaper L’Equipe on Sunday.
Togo returned home from the Nations Cup two days before the kickoff after two members of its delegation were killed in a terrorist attack on January 8 in Cabinda. CAF’s reason for punishing the victims is that it views the Togolese government’s decision to recall the team as ‘political interference’ in football affairs. The Togolese government intends to fight what it called the ‘insulting’ sanctions.
By Peter Alegi | December 28th, 2009 | 4 Comments
It is with immense sadness that we mourn the passing of Dennis Brutus, African activist and award-winning poet. The South African sport boycott owed much to his fierce commitment and relentless organizing, from his founding of the Coordinating Committee for International Recognition in Sport (1955) to the South African Sports Association (1958) and its successor, the South African Nonracial Olympic Committee. Dennis connected sport with the quest for human rights in powerful and probably unprecedented ways. Thanks largely to SANROC and its international allies, racist South Africa was expelled from the Olympics and world football. These global indictments of apartheid were huge and often undervalued milestones in the struggle against apartheid. Rest in peace Dennis. Hamba kahle.
Read Patrick Bond’s obituary here.
By Peter Alegi | December 14th, 2009 | 9 Comments
Stefan Szymanski, Director of the MBA program at Cass Business School in London and co-author of the new book Soccernomics, said on SAfm that the 2010 World Cup may turn out to be a ’shocking waste of South Africa’s resources’ and not the economic ‘bonanza that government and Fifa would have us believe’. According to Szymanski, the only benefit that SA will reap from the tournament is a ‘feel-good factor’.
Read the full story here.
By Peter Alegi | December 11th, 2009 | 3 Comments
I just watched Clint Eastwood’s new film on South Africa’s victory in the 1995 rugby World Cup, one year after the country’s first democratic elections. Invictus (the title comes from an inspirational Victorian poem) stars Matt Damon as François Pienaar, captain of the Springboks, and Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. Based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, it’s pretty good for a sports movie, a genre not usually associated with great cinematography.
The basics: thanks to Mandela’s stewardship, an all-white team (with one exception) goes from representing a sport synonymous with white supremacy to embodying the seemingly boundless potential of the postapartheid “rainbow nation.” There are some good moments. Like the team’s surprise visit to Robben Island prison, where the apartheid regime imprisoned Mandela and many other black activists during the country’s struggle for freedom. Props to Damon’s rugby moves, which are almost as good as his Afrikaans-inflected English, and to Freeman for closely matching Madiba’s physical movements and cadence. I enjoyed some of the sporting action as well, particularly the camera shots from inside the scrums.
Regrettably, sentimentality and cheesy music weaken the film. The lack of historical context and the refusal to develop any of the film’s characters (except Madiba) are also striking. We never get to know where the players come from, what their lives are like, and what happens to them after The Game. Same goes for the black and white bodyguards — a constituency usually at center stage only in movies such as In The Line of Fire and its ilk. While the final scenes project the fiction that 1995 transformed rugby from a white-dominated sport to a fully integrated one, the truth is much less uplifting. But then again, this is Hollywood history.
« Previous Posts
RSS Feed
