SPECTATOR SPORT
The poorer the better
Simon Barnes
THERE ARE people who think that rugby, or even cricket, is the national game of South Africa. But they are wrong. The national game of South Africa is, and has always been, football. Last weekend, South Africa won the African Nations Cup for the first time, beating Tunisia 2-0 in the final, in the FNB stadium on the edge of Soweto.
In South Africa, football tended to get the slightest bit overlooked because it was the game of the blacks. This was not because football has an affinity with melanism. It has an affinity with poverty. A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a sordid streetside bar in Lusaka, in the middle of the day — vital preparation for an ornitho- logical expedition to the Zairean border.
The rains had yet to come and the weath- er was coming up to the boil. But the shade was cool and the Mosi beer seriously cold, so for about two hours we sat talking, drinking and watching the football. In the blinding heat, the game did not cease for a second. Schoolboys were playing — not a shoe in sight, of course. The goals were not jumpers, because nobody had a jumper. They were sticks. The ball, which I asked to inspect, was a thing of beauty and wonder.
It was made entirely of plastic bags: bags Within bags, within bags, knotted and bound with infinite care. In Britain, children have videos, leisure centres, soft play areas and pre-teen discos. In Africa, they have plastic bags. The multitudinous bags represent childhood — the childhood of poor city boys and, quite incidentally, the future of football, for if you play football for endless hours a day — there being nothing else to do — you cannot help but get pretty good at it.
`Everyone from a town in Britain or Ire- land knows about soccer because it is the game of the streets,' Brendan Behan wrote in the 1950s. 'The ball is kept low and does not break many windows, and you are not often brought down on the hard asphalt.' He added that the rugby-playing toffs from the posh school 'we persecuted without dis- tinction of religion'.
It is not just the saving in shattered win- dows and scabby knees — you don't actual- ly need anything at all to play football, only a ball; and not even that in Africa, a land rich at least in improvisation. But the one thing you do need, in order to play the game of the streets, is a street.
And in this country we no longer have streets. We have roads instead, all full of cars, double-parked or moving frightfully fast. Football is not the game of the roads. Instead, children have a million choices. They are freed from the monomania of street football, which is something that poverty imposes on a boy. British football is less a common pursuit, more a matter of `Centres of Excellence'. In Africa, the only centre of excellence is the street.
And so, increasingly, the great players of the game come from Africa. In 1991, I watched the Liberian George Weah play for Monaco, and I wrote about him with gushing enthusiasm. Many told me that I had badly overrated him, but he has just won an international award as the best footballer in the world.
In England, the Premier League has an increasing African presence. Team-sheets glow with exotics like Daniel Amokachi, Tony Yeboah and Philomen Masinga. Mark Williams, who scored both goals for South Africa in the final, plays at club level for Wolverhampton Wanderers. Naturally, and increasingly, the best Africans play overseas because that is where the money is. Manchester United are said to be pursu- ing a South African defender with the splendid name of Mark Fish.
Traditionally, English football looked to the meaner streets of Glasgow to enrich its game. Now it must look further afield for mean streets. Africa looks set to provide us with great footballers for years to come. All you need is poverty.
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