Shooting from the Hip
By Carlos Kambaekwa
There are times when I seriously think Brrra J and his angels must have been the moer in when they created the African continent and its inhabitants.
Just when everybody is rejoicing the news that the world’s biggest showpiece the FIFA World Cup finals are finally coming to Africa, come 2010 – some funny tales are now unfolding in African football.
Ghana is set to host the next edition of the African Cup of Nations finals next year – but if there is any substance in news coming from that country concerning the status of their domestic football league, then I’m obliged to take solace from our West African brothers and give Namibian football a clean bill of health.
It’s a well-known phenomenon among teams fighting for promotion to the elite leagues to resort to all sorts of tricks in the book of tricks to gain unfair advantage over their opponents, and Namibia has been no exception to these tricks, but alas, the Namibians can learn a trick or two from their more streetwise West African brothers.
A year hardly passes by without local football bosses (with a little bit of help from a self-proclaimed football guru) challenging the relegation formula and all that kind of JAZZ.
In Namibia, club officials are sometimes too clever for their own good and would rather lose matches on the playing field, but when they see the relegation axe hovering over them – they would rather resort to the green table with all sorts of crap to have selected results overturned because of blah, blah, blah, but football authorities would have none of that.
In Ghana, two teams fighting for promotion bid farewell to the lower division in the most dignified fashion by rattling their opponents’ net on 59 occasions without conceding a single goal – that’s what we call a goal galore in football terms!!
Now, statistics have shown that football is in reality played over a period of 56 minutes at senior level while the more energetic youth are capable of chasing leather for 65-minutes.
If the above statistics are to be taken into consideration, the Ghanaian teams were scoring at a ratio of one goal per minute – a bit rather unusual, no !!, this is African football.
My ageing memory can’t recall such a cricket score line in Namibian football – however, my former club Hungry Lions came closer to that in a low-key division two match against a seven-men Ramblers Katutura outfit at the Windhoek Showground – beating the Dolam boys by 21 goals without a reply, poor Sham was between the sticks on that fateful Saturday afternoon, luckily he is still alive to tell the tale.
Sadly, there are no recorded statistics in Namibian football, while Arsenal re-wrote the history books in the English Premiership by going unbeaten in the 2003/2004 season.
Hungry Lions went on the rampage in their quest to gain promotion to the elite league in 1994 and never dropped a single point in the second division to gain promotion to the elite league in 1994.
On a rather light note, it’s really lekker to see Orlando Pirates back to winning ways because the Buccaneers have no business languishing at the base of the league in the company of teams like Friends and Golden Bees – that’s absolute foreign territory for Namibia’s best supported team.
In Ali Akan, Pirates have one of the best coaches in the business and the man has proven on many a time to be a master tactician in this particular field and the often misunderstood Turkish national possesses the quality to turn any ordinary team into champions if given the necessary support.
I’ve said it before and still strongly believe that a league without Pirates is like the global sought-after showpiece, the FIFA World Cup finals without the giants of Brazil – the beautiful game will just never be the same again.