This is African Football
on Me Talk Pretty One Day (Malawi), 20/Jan/2009 14:49, 34 days ago
Police officers patrol the touchline with automatic weapons. Employees of the sponsor drive around the pitch waving from their company cars. Members of the Malawi Defence Force perform acrobatic feats of strength in front of the main stand. Fans sing and dance on the terraces wearing home-made scarves and woolly hats. It’s Sunday afternoon and the sun is shining. If the temperature does not top one hundred degrees it must at least be close. The sun is shining, the temperature is intense, and the fans are wearing home-made scarves and woolly hats. This is Silver Stadium, home of Silver Strikers, 2008 Super Leaguechampions and pride ofLilongwe. This is African football.The terraces today are swollen with fans keen to see their heroes for the last time this season. Silver Strikers clinched the championship last week without kicking a ball after their closest rivals,Blantyre’s Big Bullets, lost a crucial game they had been comfortably leading. As they witnessed their teams’ hopes fade, fans inBlantyretook to the pitch and angrily chased the coaching staff with makeshift weapons. This is African football. After a punishing 12-year wait, the fans here inLilongwewill also take to the pitch, but they will wait until the game is over and their invasion will be one of jubilant celebration. They cheer now as the glittering silver trophy is paraded around old Silver Stadium. They sing and they dance. A few climb the perimeter fencing to orchestrate proceedings from there. Horns are blowing, firecrackers are exploding, and the fans are singing and dancing in their home-made scarves and woolly hats.The players wait in the tunnel for the pre-match festivities to end. A couple of groundsmen quickly dodge between them and sprint onto the grass carrying bags of powdered paint. They have forgotten to finish preparing the pitch and quickly add a couple of penalty arcs by hand. The players wait in the tunnel. Someone wheels out the device for marking lines but they are too late, the other groundsmen have finished and are quickly sprinting off the pitch again, their stained white hands pushing rhythmically through the air as they run, back and forth, back and forth, white hands and running. The players wait in the tunnel. The fans sing and dance on the terraces—this is African football—in their home-made scarves and woolly hats.