Sport Matters

South African football must approach the coming year 2012 as YEAR ZERO. After a year when all that South African football had achieved since readmission in 1992 was kicked into oblivion, the game and all its stakeholders  –  from the fans to administrators, and from the players to government –  must approach 2012 as the year of laying a new foundation. The debate is on whether the old foundation was not solid enough or it ever existed. The year 1992 was our original YEAR ZERO as we were entering the global stage after exclusion through the apartheid regime. The excitement was overwhelming that we ran with the ball from the word go, hoping to catch up quickly on lost time. The initial success, of tying a friendly series with Cameroon, distracted us from doing the right things from very early on. Despite subsequent struggles in the qualifying tournaments for 1994 World Cup qualifiers and 1996 Africa Cup of Nations, South Africa remained cocky, hoping that money and raw talent of our p

There is good and bad in Benni McCarthy’s altercation with Bidvest Wits’ players and staff after the Telkom Knockout final at Durban’s Moses Mabhida stadium last Saturday. Firstly, it was bad for him to remonstrate with his former Bafana Bafana teammate and now Wits assistant coach Eric Tinkler. Benni had raised Tinkler’s ire when he “trampled” on defender Sipho Mngomezulu. When he left the pitch when he was substituted with Pirates already 3-1, McCarthy made a disparaging gesture towards the Wits bench, apparently to taunt his ex-Bafana mate. Then at final whistle a victorious Benni boisterously threw expletives at Tinkler, and had to be restrained by Pirates’ staff. Even doubly bad was McCarthy’s rejection of the mandatory post-match handshake attempt by Wits striker Ryan Chapman. He alleged lashed out at Chapman, forgetting that the aspiring young striker is a homeboy from Cape Town, who grew up idolizing him at the height of his international career. He was on Chapmans’ c