Sport

A moment of silence for the Bafana team caterers, please. Benni McCarthy’s exclusion from the World Cup squad must come as a dreadful blow to them. A dreadful blow indeed. That’s my offering to the ever-increasing collection of Benni jokes doing the rounds. His must be one of the most inglorious career closures in South […]

One morning, recently, I woke up to realise that this 2010 thing is happening. You know what 2010 thing I am talking about, right? I have not bought into it and I am in the passive revolution against it. Please do not get me wrong, I am usually very optimistic (NOT), but it’s just the […]

Why it is that African countries have to go through the painful and expensive exercise of convincing the so-called first world that South Africa, in particular, is ready and capable of hosting the Fifa World Cup? We toiled culturally to showcase our rainbow nation as not barbaric, and politically to prove a matured democracy and […]

By Dave Harris An ancient Chinese proverb states that “even the gods cannot help those who do not seize opportunities”. The 2010 Fifa World Cup has ushered in a window of opportunity for all South Africans to seize with both hands! To put our best foot forward towards healing the old wounds of our tragic […]

It’s often been said that competitive sport is an arena for the world to indulge their war-mongering urges without an inordinate fear of dying. And barring certain events such as the Isle of Man TT, it is mostly true. Just like war, competitive sport allows the masses to work themselves into a frenzy and feel […]

Thierry Henry’s efforts to become the first soccer player in history to lift rugby’s William Webb Ellis Trophy, while playing in the football World Cup, were bound to leave a bitter taste in the mouths of most Irish fans and neutrals who witnessed it. It truly was a disgusting episode. Fifa, however, have taken this […]

Usually, when the sandman fails to make his nightly visits (which is a frequent occurrence in my world), I kill time in the early morning hours by either reading or writing. However, having recently finished reading the rather unimaginative seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia there is hardly anything of interest on my bookshelf. This is perhaps […]

Imagine if instead of winning billions of rands of prize money when you won a soccer World Cup game, you won the country you played against. If, instead of using nuclear weapons, expensive artillery and valuable human lives to wage war, each state had to fight their territorial or ideological battles through soccer. If, after […]