admineven as a teenage Canadian opener, Hiral Patel, illuminated the show with an impressive display of power hitting against Australia’s fast bowlers in Bangalore.
Patel had averaged just 13, going into the match against the champions, with a highest score of 43, but such was his impact, in driving little Canada to the fastest half century at this World Cup, contributing 36 of those runs, he did not only become an overnight sensation but sent the champions into soul-searching mode.
Instead the iconic image from the world of sport this week came from the Allianz Arena in Munich after Inter Milan’s sensational comeback win over German giants Bayern Munich, which kept the Italians on course to become the first team to defend their crown in the era of the Champions League.
This time it wasn’t a delirious Jose Mourinho, in triumphant mode, celebrating winning the Champions League with his beloved Inter, for his beloved Inter fans and for his special Inter president Massimo Moratti.
Yes, it was another Inter win over Bayern, the same story from the Champions League final last year, the same superstars who crafted that victory – Eto’o, Sneijder, Julio Cesar – a Brazilian coach borrowed from their bitter city rivals and the old Italian/German rivalry. Inter became only the second team, in the era of the Champions League, to overturn a first leg home loss and advance, erasing a 0-1 defeat in Milan and finding an island of hope, in an ocean of hopelessness when Bayern led 2-1 on the night and 3-1 on aggregate, to still fight and win on away goals rule.
Goals by Sneijder and Goran Pandev, with just two minutes remaining, gave Inter a 3-2 win in Munich and, tying the aggregate score 3-3, the Italians advanced to the quarter-finals on the back of the away goals rules as their three goals in Germany suddenly turned into six.
A year to the moment when Bayern somehow came from 0-3 down at Old Trafford, to score twice in a 2-3 loss and win on the away goals rule, the gods of football gave the Germans a timely reminder that they represent all teams in this world and, what goes around, usually comes around. So, as Inter celebrated an historic triumph on Tuesday night, one iconic image captured the imagination of a world lost in the grief, confusion, and uncertainty, which has followed the monster earthquake that rattled Japan and triggered a tsunami and that explosion at a nuclear plant.
Yuto Nagotomo was probably unknown to many fans around the world even though he had played well enough, at the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa, to be included by Arsene Wenger on his All-Star XI for the tournament and earned a contract to play in Italy.
The 24-year-old, who became the first Japanese player to feature for Inter when he moved there on loan from Cesena, caught the eye of the globe as he went on a lap of honour, after his team’s triumph in Munich, waving a giant Japanese flag.
It was the message, on that Japanese flag, which caught the eye: “You Will Never Walk Alone.”
It might be a Liverpool signature tune, but, in the lights of Munich, it assumed a wider meaning.
It soon became clear what it all meant, that Yuto was telling all of us that, even in this moment of triumph, his thoughts were with the people back home in his motherland, ravaged by nature’s superpowers, and as he waved that flag, we all joined him in his moment of reflection.
That was why both sets of fans, including the defeated supporters of Bayern Munich still trying to come to terms with how their team had blown its chance with just two minutes remaining in regulation time, joined in the salute to reflect on the tough times facing the Japanese people.
Now and again, there comes a time when sport pales into insignificance, when we get a reminder that there are more important things than the games we watch and play, that there are more important things than winning the Cricket World Cup or, as Spain did in Johannesburg last year, winning the Fifa World Cup.
I have read a lot of stuff coming from the disaster in Japanbut one article, which I reproduce below, really touched my spirit.
A Fragile Country At The Mercy Of Nature
By Hugh Levinson
Tokyo – The world is reacting with shock at the huge quake and tsunami that has devastated Japan, but people there have learnt to expect natural disasters.
The first indication was a humming and a rattling.
Hundreds of upturned beer glasses on wooden shelves, shook from side to side, then knocked into each other. Conversation dimmed then stopped completely.
Faces looked from one to another across the plates of tempura and sushi.
“Quick,” shouted the barman, “turn off the gas.”
It was my first experience of a tremor, just a few days after I had gone to live in Japan. And it was typical – everyone trying to gauge just how serious this quake was going to be. When should we get up and try to run outdoors? Or would we have to dive under the tables? Or seek safety under a door frame – which we all knew was the strongest part of the room?
It is no coincidence that tsunami is a Japanese word.
After a few seconds the tremor subsided, the conversation picked up, the sushi chef started wielding his heavy knife on the chopping block.
Just a few seconds later, a white subtitle appeared on the TV in the corner – it was on all channels – indicating the size of the quake and the location of the epicentre.
It was not the “big one”.
But everyone knew that one was coming.
The question was: when?
Tradition held that animals and fish would act strangely ahead of a quake – carp, for example, would jump out of the water. Japanese people live with an ever-present expectation of natural disaster – floods, hurricanes, fires, and most of all earthquakes and the massive waves they can generate.
The native religion, Shinto, is animist – speaking of the divine nature of trees and mountains, of goddesses who emerged from deep clefts in the rocks.
The very earth can seem alive.
The islands sit on a massive fault line and the classic image of the country is the perfect volcanic cone of Mount Fuji. Boiling hot water steams up from cracks in the rocks, exploited for the natural hot springs that are one of the country’s great wonders.
Schoolchildren still commemorate the victims of the Kanto earthquake All Japanese know that at any time the powers of the earth can turn against them.
In 1923, the great Kanto earthquake devastated Tokyo.
Fires raged across a city built of wooden houses, killing an estimated 140 000 people.
Since then the population on the Kanto plain has grown massively in an interconnected series of cities from the mountains down to the sea.
Everyone knows that the pressure between the tectonic plates deep underground will be released sometime.
Everyone prepares.
An ever-present sense of disaster is deeply woven into traditional ways.
The city of Tokyo has shown extraordinary resilience.
In March 1945, a couple of decades after the great earthquake, American B29s dropped incendiary bombs on the city of wooden houses.
The resulting firestorm killed 100 000 people in the course of a single night.
Waiting for the “big one” is a part of Japanese life and the carp, it turns out, are no help. They have no better idea of when a tremor will strike than the rest of us. – BBC
Lessons From Japan
The Japanese people have given our world a host of lessons with their resilience, emerging from the ashes of World War II to become a global economic powerhouse whose cars we all love to drive, whose TVs we all love to watch, whose laptops we all love to use.
They have even risen from a country that seemed to concentrate on sumo wrestling and baseball to become one of the best football nations in the world and, this year, their national team beat Australia1-0 in the final of the Asian Cup as they continued the good form shown at the World Cup in South Africa.
They didn’t just do that overnight.
Being Japanese, they invested a lot into planning for their football and they hired some of the best football brains, including Wenger, Zico of Brazil and Phillipe Troussier of France, who came into their game at different intervals and helped in its transformation.
In the countdown to the 2010 World Cup finals, the Japanese were one of just two World Cup-bound teams that had the courtesy to play our Warriors in a friendly international, paying for all our bills for that game in George, South Africa, which ended goalless.
The Brazilians were the other side to do so.
So, given their goodwill gesture to our Warriors, it was only logical that I should support the Japanese in South Africa and I was hurt when they lost in the second round, going out on penalties, but I was happy that they had made their mark and guys like Keisuke Honda had left a lasting impression. In South Africa, the Japanese appeared to be the team that knew how best to hit the Jabulani ball from distance and there was always something special, every time they tried to do so, with some goals, and other shots that slammed against the woodwork, leaving enduring images.
So I felt for the Japanese when news broke out about the monster earthquake and, as Yuto waved his national flag on Wednesday night, my prayers went for him and his stricken nation.
So What About Us?
Three weeks on this Indian sub-continent, covering a Cricket World Cup being played where all its money is generated from, has helped me to see sport in a very different way.
It has left me with a lot of questions, than answers, about our overall approach to sport.
We tell each other that we are a sport-loving nation and our media is obsessed with describing us as either football-crazy or cricket-crazy, but the brutal truth is that we are very far from getting close to be described as a nation that loves and lives sport.
To us sport is a pastime.
Yes, we love the Warriors but it’s a distant relationship, there isn’t that personal attachment, to compare with the way the Indians love their national cricket team.
Yes, we love our national cricket team but, again, it’s a distant relationship, there isn’t that personal attachment, to compare with the way the Sri Lankans or Bangladeshi love their national cricket teams.
But it’s not our fault, as fans, alone on this one.
The Government hasn’t played the leading role, in terms of turning our sport from a past-time into a full-time industry, and that’s why you find our school sporting calendar is still run on a flawed programme where football is played in only one term.
Athletics is for the first term, football for the second term, why?
Why should a budding football player, who is in primary school, wait for the second term to start playing his game and honing his skills rather than play the game throughout the year – first term, second term and third term – because that is the only way his technique can be improved at such a tender age?
Why should a budding athlete, who dreams of one day eclipsing Tendai Chimusasa by finishing better than ninth in the marathon at the Olympics, only be limited to honing his skills in the first term when an all-year concentration on that could be more beneficial at that tender age?
Why should the next Tatenda Taibu be limited, when it comes to playing his school cricket in a country blessed with superb climatic conditions the game can be played all year round, rather than hone his skills, at a key phase of his life, by playing the game competitively throughout the three terms?
Four years ago I went to Hwedza for Wellington Nyatanga’s schools’ tournament and we were all seduced by the brilliance of one young forward, whose name I can’t remember, who played his football with his bare feet and whose control, vision, pace and power were just superb.
Sunday Chidzambwa was the guest of honour at that event and, in his address, he told us that the young man reminded him of the first time he saw a teenage Moses Chunga arriving at Dynamos and was immediately struck by his raw genius he quickly concluded that they had just signed a man who would make a huge difference at the team.
Mhofu, though, asked a pertinent question, captured by the various print and electronic journalists at that football festival, about why we still played football for just one term in most of our schools when we keep telling each other that this was our national game?
Four years down the line, Mhofu’s questions haven’t been answered yet.
As expected, that boy genius we saw in Hwedza that day has been lost to our game, one of the thousands from the rural areas that we lose all the time, probably frustrated by chasing a dream in a country that gave very little attention, and very little help, to poor boys like him.
And, after all that, we still call ourselves a football nation.Here in India they are a cricket nation and you are reminded about that everywhere you go.
The cricket academies are everywhere, very good structures that keep tapping into the millions of young batsmen and bowlers coming out of their country, nurturing them from a very young age and developing them in the hope that they might become the next Sachin Tendulkar.
On Thursday the national cricket team trained at the Mumbai Cricket Academy, a five-star facility, and now and again you could see a steady stream of young boys coming in with their bats and going into lessons about the game that is part of their lives.
You are reminded by virtually every advert that comes out on television that this is cricket country because, for a product to sell here, it has to be endorsed by the cricket stars, the Tendulkars, the Dhonis, the Zaheers, because those are the heroes among the fans.
If a product is not branded by the cricket stars then it is branded by the Bollywood stars.
You are reminded by virtually all the billboards that you see on the roads, which feature the cricket stars advertising this and that product.
You think about what we have back home and you remember that billboard, as you enter Chitungwiza, which features Norman Mapeza preaching the gospel against abuse of women and children and that other billboard, which features More Moyo, preaching the gospel of the virtues of circumcision in the battle against HIV/Aids.
Knowledge Musona, for all the waves that he has created in South Africa, is not a face that can be used to sell a product by our companies and Benjani, for all the profile that comes with playing in the English Premiership, is not the kind of face that our own Barclays can use on their adverts related to that Premiership.
The legendary Peter Ndlovu is there in Harare now but when did you see his face being used to try and sell a product on television or his voice used to try and do the same on radio?
And this is the man who the English media said was as good as George Best, during the peak of his career at Coventry City, who took us to two Nations Cup finals – the only two that we have played in – who decided to come back home, when his foreign mission was over, to help the game where his career started.
In the past three weeks, right in the heart of the billion-dollar global cricket industry, I have realised that we are still too far behind, as a nation, to start describing ourselves as sport-crazy people.
At best, I believe we are mostly a bunch of day-dreaming opportunists who just wait for something good to happen to our sport and our sportsmen.
And we tell each other that we all like Dynamos to win the Champions League but we are not prepared to help them foot the massive costs that come with such an exercise and, when the debts cripple the team, we attack the leadership and everyone associated with that club.
They are a doomed club, we tell each other as we sip our beers at Jazz 105, they are a haunted club, we tell ourselves as we down our beers at Mereki, they are a useless club, we tell each other as we drink our beers at Alex Sports Club, and we laugh at their players when they strike for their salaries because we believe they are misguided elements. But are they?
We are not prepared to walk with them in a journey that costs a fortune and every year, when their players suffer because of the compromised financial resource base at the club, we all look at them as if wondering what the hell they were doing when they took part in the Champions League. Where are our companies in all this?
Where are you MTN, whom I’m told are interested in buying 49 percent of the stake of NetOne, because this is one company that you are guaranteed will come big into our football?
We all want Motor Action to do very well in the Champions League and probably celebrated that they will now play a one-off game against ASEC Mimosas, who famously robbed Dynamos of their moment of glory in 1998 in Abidjan, but when it comes to footing the costs we all watch as Eric and Liz Rosen battle the odds. This is the same Mighty Bulls who didn’t receive a cent for winning the league championship last year and, in their first Champions League tie, found themselves having to foot a US$300 000 bill.
Bravely they went to Madagascar, even after they had lost at home, on a trip bankrolled by debt and courageously they didn’t only win that battle but had the nerve to keep their focus in the penalty shootout to edge their opponents and qualify for this round.
Both Motor Action and Dynamos are walking alone and soon, the effects of the debts they are accruing will be felt, and noone will be there for them.
And we still call ourselves a football-mad nation.
We have an expectation for Zifa to perform when it is very clear that it is being strangled by a lack of funds in a country whose companies have very little interests in putting money into football.
Yes, our football has an identity problem but tell me which sporting discipline doesn’t have one and I will give you the world.
But why is all the money going into Caf when we know Issa Hayatou is probably the worst football administrator the world has ever known, why is all the money going into Fifa when the British media is full of corruption reports about the game’s leadership based in Switzerland and why is all the money going into world cricket with all the controversy that the game has?
DeMbare, Champions League, Boardroom Wrangles
Viewing the social websites, especially being so far away from home, you are bombarded by the excitement among the Dynamos fans around the world about the team that Lloyd Mutasa is creating and, incredibly, some have even gone to the extent of suggesting that the Glamour Boys will this season play like Barcelona.
Lloyd was a stylish midfielder, one of the very best players that I have seen in action, and – had he emerged in another era – he could have played his football at a far bigger stage than playing the rest of his football at home.
He appears to have embraced the same stylish ways into his coaching and he never compromised them when he guided little Kiglon last year and transformed them into a team that played some eye-catching football and, crucially, which had the heart to play its best game against the big teams.
Dynamos have some of the most exciting players in Zimbabwe right now and maybe you can understand the cause for optimism among their fans.
They have guys who are hungry to make a name for themselves and, in the case of Denver Mukamba and Archie Gutu, who have already been given a grand stage to showcase their talents and now want to prove that they belong to the same class as the big boys.
But Dynamos, being DeMbare, means that you always have to treat what is coming out of the club with a little bit of caution.
I have been around for too long to know that because I was there at the turn of the millennium when Moses Chunga’s Kidznet project suffered a stillbirth.
The pressure is on Mutasa now to keep winning and, in my view, that will be the club’s fault line because there is a general expectation that all the teams will not only be beaten but the team will do it with a style that will delight the fans.
It’s hard to bank on Dynamos to win the league championship these days because they seem to have perfected the art of finishing second and I think, contrary to what most of their fans believe, this will be a tough season for the Glamour Boys.
Yes, they have some exciting talent but bigger tests will come along the way and if they can do very well, and that means winning without conceding a goal against this Algerian side this week, then they would have started on the right track.
But who will be in charge of the team in the boardroom is the big question and, as we all know, it has a direct effect on the club’s fortunes.
Today the founding fathers meet again in Harare in what is expected to be a watershed meeting.
What they need to do is speak with one voice, on key issues, and in recent times they have shown deep divisions it has been hard to believe that they are working for a similar cause.
In that atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion, rumours have been bred and have been spread on all the social media sites about some missing funds that were meant to pay the family of a deceased member of that board of directors, about sons and daughters of deceased board members who now want a stake, about splits in the board that has also led to splits in the executive. The Dynamos politics will always provide interesting twists and turns but what is clear is that the club’s board of directors should realise that along the way, either through their reluctance to shed some of their control and invite partners or simply because of their reliance on outdated methods of management, have kept their club trapped in the past.
I was speaking to a football agent based in Europe that other day, who has key interests in Zimbabwean football, and our discussion somehow strayed into the Dynamos area and he was saying he wanted to have a look at Denver and Archie and will come to Harare for some time for this adventure.
We talked about the pre-season tournaments that Dynamos have won, and a little bit of cash into their coffers which they had not originally planned for, and he said if he was in the club’s leadership positions, one of the first things he would have done was to go and buy a team bus. Why?
He said it was important for this team to have the right stature, which goes with such big football clubs, and a team bus was a must and everything else would take second place.
Wow!!!
Lessons From Cricket
One of the things that have struck me on this tour of duty is how cricket takes care of its players and you just had to go to the hotel where the Zimbabwe team was staying here in Mumbai to realise that there is a big difference between our cricket and our football.
The cricket and football players back home live in two different worlds.
I visited the team hotel on Wednesday night, having been invited to attend Heath Streak’s 35th birthday party, and I was swept away by this luxurious structure.
The Taj-Lands End is a five-star hotel, located on the edges of the city, surrounded on all the three sides by sea and from every rooms you get a very good view of sunrise and sunset.
Close to the hotel you see the villa of Bollywood star Sharukh Khan and, surrounded by about 10 beautiful churches, the Taj-Lands End is located in the exclusive Bandra neighbourhood and has18 stories, a three-storey lobby and 493 guestrooms including 33 suites, each of which offers a panoramic of the Arabian Sea.
The national team does not only live in luxury, during such tours, but even at international airports they are given VVIP treatment and they don’t have to queue, for immigration formalities, with the rest of the travelers like myself.
Their immigration documents are sorted out while they are watching television in the VVIP suite at the airports and while they are also being served with a cup of tea. Their security, straight with commandos, is as tight as they will ever come and you just don’t get into their hotel and neither do the players and their team management leave the hotel without the permission of their security personnel.
What has impressed me about this World Cup is the way the International Cricket Council values the status of the players and their officials who are taking part in this tournament.
It doesn’t matter whether you are England, India, Australia or Zimbabwe, the treatment is just the same and all the players and their officials have to be treated like true VVIPs.
Now, this is a small sporting discipline, with only 11 ODI status members and 10 Test members, played mainly in the old British colonies where all the driving is on the left side of the road.
Now, just think about CHAN, which had 16 teams, and initially involved about 50 African countries, and the way national teams were treated on that tour of duty.
The hotels were bad, we were told, and the food was horrible, so bad that one day all our players decided there was no need to keep eating that stuff and skipper their meal.
In cricket you arrive in Bangladesh, whether it’s a normal tour or a World Cup, and the national team is given special treatment consistent with its status.
It’s the same story in Sri Lanka, same story here in India, same story in Australia, same story in Pakistan and same story in the West Indies.
You go back to African football and visiting teams are thrown into sub-standard hotels in West Africa, they are kept waiting for hours at airports after their arrival to destroy their morale, rowdy fans are sent to their hotels to sing and beat drums throughout the night before the match and you complain to the match commissioner and he tells you that’s African football for you.
In cricket if umpires aren’t performing, like Asoka da Silva, they are not given the matches that matter because the game is striving to produce the best possible winner under the fairest conditions.
In African football referees seem to try and do more than the players, to enhance the cause of the home team, and dubious goals like the one we conceded in Liberia are upheld and, even if you complain, there will be nothing to come from a Caf leadership that sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil.
We lost in the group stages at this World Cup but it wasn’t because there was a conspiracy for us to lose but simply because, when the big tests came, we were not ready for the challenge.
The Warriors will travel to Mali next week and chances are that, no matter the scoreline, we will hear a number of sorry tales of how they were ill-treated by their hosts and how the match officials ended up playing for the Eagles in Bamako.
You know cricket makes you appreciate the true values of sport, where you lose because the opponent is better, and you look at the chaos that is prevalent in African football and you wonder whether it’s worth all the investment that nations and teams put into the adventure.
Kaizer Chiefs decided, some time ago, that it wasn’t worth it to play in African club competitions that appear tailor-made to serve the interests of the Western and North African teams, where the prize money is just but a name and is usually swallowed by the costs you pay for the live transmission of your matches.
Man Of The Week
That prize has to go to Alois Bunjira for his sober analysis in The Sunday Mail of Asiagate and his refreshing views arguing that a Fifa ban, on our players, will be totally unfair.
Simba Rushwaya also touched on the same subject with a masterly hand.
After months of towing that line, it’s great to see that other major journalistic voices are also seeing the light.
My point remains that why should our players be banned, for whatever happened during Asiagate, when the same principle wasn’t applied when the Botswana national team went to China and played in some dubious games that cost the country’s football chief executive his job.
The Botswana football authorities, in their judgment, said their CEO knew that the team would play in a fixed match but still sanctioned the trip.
Two years later Botswana is now number 68 in the world, about to qualify for the 2012 Nations Cup finals, and noone has talked about their players being banned by Fifa.
Togo were in the news about a suspicious game they played in Bahrain last year but we haven’t had of any threats of Fifa bans.
It’s either we are the ones who are inviting the suspensions, which would be tragic really, given they are the same players we are still banking on to take us to the 2012 Nations Cup finals and we still expect them to perform brilliantly with uncertainty hanging on their future.
The New Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole
Welcome to our world baby-faced Assassin. Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Chicharitooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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