Soccer and the Presidential third term

With all the talk about the soccer team this week almost no one has noticed that the old three terms and more issue has surfaced again regarded our beloved el Presidente.

With regard to soccer team what can one say that hasn't already been said? A whole load of people actually took the trouble to go to the International airport and boo the team when it came home. That takes the kind of rage that goes beyond comment.

Perhaps it's time to set aside this predilection we have for putting some 'pigmentally challenged' duffer in charge of coaching the international team. Old Ted Whatisname is a well-meaning fellow but obviously he hasn't got what it takes to make magic and only managed to turn stickmen into prima donnas. Perhaps too it is time we realised that by calling our team some fancy name for BOYS it is ultimately inevitable they will fall when they play men.

Frankly I don't much care for soccer or cricket and only slightly for the new type of professional rugby to which we are still having so much difficulty adjusting. I did once go to a soccer match. It was during my second year at Wits back in '68 and I went with some soccer mad classmates. A team called Durban City played a team called Rangers at a place called the Rand Stadium. It was an important game apparently and the place was packed and I'm not too wild about crowds of people in one place. According to the newspaper the next day there were more than twenty thousand pigmentally challenged people at the match.

The newspaper didn't say 'pigmentally challenged' by the way, since the phrase hadn't been invented. In fact the colour of the crowd was assumed. I mention it today because it would be inconceivable to me to have as many as twenty 'pigmentally challenged' human beings at a major soccer match these days never mind twenty thousand. .

The dark strapping young fellows who play the game today with such zest and verve, earning more in a week than my grandfather, a nineteenth century professional athlete earned in his entire career, have grown up in a world where the Pale Male is a loser, and any recommendation made by a 'Paley' is shrugged off as inconsequential, sometimes politely more often not. Courtesy and good manners have no place in a democracy since they imply obligation and freeborn citizens have no need to feel obligation to anyone. They are not owned and no one is more important than they are.

Add to this that our society has become so subliminally racist following half a decade or so of overt racist legislation that appointing yet another 'Paley' to the job will be a simple waste of time.

And talking of 'time' ,we already look as if we have tossed the idea of having the Gautrain ready for 2010, assuming it ever gets onto its obsolete nineteenth century railway lines. There is in addition no indication beyond the now almost platitudinous promises that the stadia are on route to construction, or reconstruction or whatever is supposed to happen. The country is cruising towards the big event on a sea of bland promises and failed illusions -

'We did our best' we say and what was it Sean Connery's character says about 'doing their best' 'Why is it that losers always whine on about doing their best.'

It seems now an appropriate time to formalise the process of 2010 preparation and remover 'Whitey' from the loop altogether. This development of the team must be driven by those who know the minds of the players and Ted and his ilk have demonstrated signally that they don't.

It is small wonder that the President's yes men are mooting the idea that the president should have a third term. The sense of impending panic to which I have been referring for some time now is becoming more tangible. Who is there that a good man can trust to take over the job of being coach to the team: president to the nation.

Curiously with regard to El Presidente incumbentis, the devil one knows may be better than the wild cards that lurk in the sidelines. What offended everyone about the soccer team was that they thought more about their paycheck than the honour of supporting their country. Yet every role model they could look to for inspiration in our rapidly commoditising society is rooted in gimme, I wannit, and fuck you get out of my trough.

Those young soccer men were right to be more concerned about being paid than about honour. The entire process of selection to play at that level appears to be so completely arbitrary and rooted in preferences that the entire team could be changed from game to game and the likelihood of career ending injuries accompany each game. Therefore sensible and assertive and presumably talented persons want everything they can get up front before the action, rather like sensible prostitutes.

As for whether the President should go for a third term, one only has to look at that pale shadow of his former lying self to see what a third term is doing to that Pommie chap Phony Haire.

Everything has gone wrong for Phony since he took on the heavy mantle for a third session. Poor chap looks more and more like a wastrel furtive ferret caught masturbating in a public toilet every time he opens his mouth in public, which he should do less often. Even his eye patterning movements have taken on the shiftiness that one associates with overt duplicity, he can barely hide the empty hollow ring of his words every time he opens his mouth.

It would be better for the incumbent to leave while one is ahead on points. Our President's status is currently sealed. He is the one who brought the African Parliament to Gauteng making us truly the Zone One of Africa. This is his lasting legacy to us who barely comprehend its strategic and long-term importance. Whatever else he achieved will be relatively ephemeral as fickle citizens become ever more cynical about the doings and screwings of that much to be despised class of animal called el Politician.

In looking at both these issues one has to ask- what will change to make anything different 'next time'.