By Mohlomi Maubane
SOWETO, South Africa — “Why the f**k did he not do that at West Ham!!!” reads a YouTube comment in response to the video clip above featuring Benni McCarthy’s superb free kick in the 2011 Telkom Cup quarterfinal between Orlando Pirates and Moroka Swallows. This is the best goal I have seen in the PSL era: an extraordinary strike in a tense match Pirates were losing by a goal to nil. And while Swallows players were still scratching their heads in bewilderment, he got a second and sealed the match.
West Ham were the last European team McCarthy played for in a chequered 14-year European career whose highlight was a 2004 UEFA Champions League medal with FC Porto under Jose Mourinho. A sometimes controversial character who had endless run-ins with the South African Football Association, Benni set tongues wagging in the local football scene when he decided to return to South Africa. Some critics believed he was over the hill while others knew he still had something to offer. The man himself said he still had a lot of football in him, and with the right service, he would excel. At Orlando Pirates, he found the perfect setting to shine although he would have to do it without Dutch coach Ruud Krol who had just left after three years at the helm.
The Mighty Bucs boasted one of the best squads in the country and were brimming with confidence after winning a treble the previous season. Krol’s long term (at least in South African terms) afforded him the required time to build a team and mould plentiful talent in service of the collective. Team-play became paramount above all else, and prima donnas were booted out. The defense became mean. Opponents learned the hard way that beating Pirates meant playing to the final whistle. For example, in a November league game against Swallows. The Dube Birds looked set for a 1-0 victory, but as my friend Katiso Motaung wryly noted, Pirates managed to turn defense into attack and Jele equalized in the nanoseconds it took the referee to lift the whistle to his mouth to blow full time.
Category: Players
If Didier Drogba represents the image of a contemporary African hero on the global stage then who or what does Senegalese striker El Hadji Diouf represent?
Meet Digital Diouf. David Kilpatrick’s intriguing post in the New York Times GOAL blog tells us about “We Tripped El Hadji Diouf: The Story of a Photoshop Thread,” a recent exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
The story is about the intersection of sport, art, and digital technology. At the heart of it is a three-second clip of Diouf (at Rangers) sent flying by Hearts midfielder Ian Black’s tackle. The video was photoshopped and then posted on SomethingAwful.com, where users imaginatively molded it into extraordinarily creative and wide-ranging videos. Eventually, 35 of the videos were looped together and displayed at the Museum of the Moving Image.
“While many of the images embrace Diouf’s agony as some kind of karmic retribution for his villainy,” Kilpatrick writes, “others allow technology to revise the outcome and provide a happy ending.” Rumor has it that Dakar’s digital griots are planning a sequel.
Categories
Benni Leads Orlando Pirates to PSL Title
Benni McCarthy’s two second-half goals earned Orlando Pirates their second consecutive Premier Soccer League title. It was sweet revenge for McCarthy writes Rodney Reiners in the Cape Argus, “He’s been put down, trampled on, ridiculed, and dismissed as an over-weight, over-rated charlatan more often than any footballer should have to endure. Yet, each time, the 34-year-old Cape Town-born striker has come back to splatter copious bowls of beaten egg on the faces of his critics.”
McCarthy — the most prolific scorer in Bafana Bafana’s history — has experienced a rebirth since the humiliation of being left off the 2010 World Cup squad for lack of fitness (see photo).
Pirates went into the tense closing Saturday with a two-point lead over Soweto rivals Moroka Swallows. Both contenders took care of business in their away matches in KwaZulu-Natal: Bucs beating Golden Arrows 4-2 at Durban’s monumental but seldom-used Moses Mabhida stadium (highlights here); The Birds winning 1-0 at Maritzburg United’s more humble and intimate Harry Gwala stadium.
Smiling broadly, Benni McCarthy told Ryan Cooper of Kick Off magazine: “I’m doing the thing I love most, and that is playing football. The haters out there . . . next year I’m gonna keep coming back with more!”
Tomorrow’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich seems promising, even for neutrals like me. The Bavarians are at home, but Chelsea are currently in better form. In an intriguing twist, Chelsea have four players suspended, Bayern three, “which means any assessment of what might happen is going to be dotted with ifs and maybes” writes Jonathan Wilson in his SI.com column.
So let’s play every armchair manager’s favorite fun game. My prediction: Chelsea 2, Bayern 1, possibly after extra time. Goalscorers: Drogba, Mata, and Robben.
What’s your prediction?
WE WERE THERE By Alessandro Del Piero
When we were winning, always. On the pitch, more than anyone else.
When we fell.
When we didn’t know where we would end up.
When we learnt, and accepted it. Struggling to rise up again.
When we took the field in Rimini.
When the others celebrated.
When we were just watching.
When they hoped we would never return.
When we started climbing back up.
When we couldn’t find our way.
When we found it: winning.
This is our party, conquered right at the last drop of sweat.
It’s the party of all those who always believed.
It’s the party of all you Juve fans who instead of abandoning us let your voice be heard even louder,
It’s the party of those who cheered for a goal in serie B as much as the one that brought the scudetto.
It’s the party, why not, of opponents (not all) who always respected us.
It’s the party of Balzaretti, Belardi, Bianco, Birindelli, Bojinov, Boumsong, Buffon, Camoranesi, Chiellini, De Ceglie, Giannichedda, Giovinco, Guzman, Kovac, Lanzafame, Legrottaglie, Marchionni, Marchisio, Mirante, Nedved, Palladino, Paro, Piccolo, Trezeguet, Venitucci, Zalayeta, Zanetti, Zebina. Manager Deschamps.
And it had to end like this, I never stopped believing.
Thank you, lads. Let’s enjoy this, we deserved it.
I was there, you were there. We were there. And we are here, finally.
We have returned.
Alessandro
[My translation from the original Italian here. Grazie Vlad for sending it!]
ESPN The Magazine’s Money Issue salary survey project reveals that average paychecks of athletes in US professional leagues pale in comparison to the wages of top soccer players in Europe. Barcelona topped the rankings with a total wage bill of $217 million and an average player salary of $8.7 million. Real Madrid’s average wages came in second at about $7.8 million though the club’s total payroll was about $3 million less than the New York Yankees baseball team.
7 of the top 10 highest paying sports teams are European soccer clubs, including Manchester City, Chelsea, AC Milan, Bayern Munich, and Inter. The lowest-paying teams are from Major League Soccer and the Canadian Football League.
The survey was conducted by sportingintelligence.com for ESPN. It accounted for 278 teams in 14 major pro leagues, covering seven sports in 10 countries, comprising 7,925 athletes making a combined $15.69 billion in salary. Read the full article here.
For more information, see Deloitte’s annual report on European soccer revenues here.
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Long John is Gone
Giorgio Chinaglia died yesterday, April 1, in Florida at the age of 65. The sad news brought back a flood of memories. I remember how as a kid in Rome in the 1970s, my grandfather had a funny habit of responding to my detailed stories about meaningless youth football matches by saying: “You are just like Giorgio Chinaglia.” Maybe it was the curly hair, pronounced chin, and slightly curved shoulders. Or maybe it was the unmitigated joy of my goal celebrations, I don’t know.
I was not a Lazio supporter, but I liked how my grandfather connected me to the prolific striker who had recently won the scudetto (Italian league title) and then had joined the most glamorous team in the world: the New York Cosmos. Growing up in a bicultural family (American dad / Italian mom), I also shared a linguistic connection with Chinaglia. His family had immigrated to Wales after World War II (his father found work in a foundry) and he had started his professional career at Swansea City before returning to Italy. This Welsh background explained his “Long John” nickname, inspired by Juventus’s Welsh center-forward John Charles of the late 1950s and early 60s. I was too young to watch the broadcasts of the 1974 World Cup, but I knew of Long John’s performance in Italy’s opener against minnows Haiti. With Italy leading 2-1, Chinaglia was substituted and refused to shake coach Valcareggi’s extended hand, offering instead a theatrical “vaffanculo” (“fuck off”) for the television cameras. Needless to say, that was the end of Chinaglia’s Italy career.