JD Bryce explains all

And he/she explains it in a letter to the Cape Times today.
Over to you, JD Bryce of St James:

The tirade against Bakkies Botha compels me to defend him.

Ti•rade [tahy-reyd, tahy-reyd] – noun; a prolonged outburst of bitter, outspoken denunciation.

Ok – I’ll give you the denunciation bit – and maybe a hint of bitterness because he was an idiot.
But prolonged?
He only did it 6 days ago (and therefore a maximum of 5 days before you wrote your letter). Prolonged is when something goes on for longer than it really should – like discussion over Luis Suarez’s goalline handball (which I’m still in awe of) or whether Jacob Zuma should have stood trial for corruption (still raised most days on Cape Talk).
And outspoken?  No. Everyone (including Bakkies) realises that it was a bloody stupid thing to do. Apart from you. But apparently, you are compelled and have a compulsion to defend him.

So I’ll let you continue, despite your initial foolishness and inaccuracy, because I’m nice like that.

I believe the real reason for his action is the New Zealand Haka.

Ah! Sorry – I misunderstood! This is a sarcastic letter. Amusement! Satire! Hilarity!
Go for it, JD!

The Haka is nothing more than a barrage of abuse in which the All Blacks threaten to beat the other team to a pulp and sever arms and legs. This raises the their [sic] adrenaline levels and creates a dominance over the other team.

Nice build up – and now deliver that punchline!

I believe Bakkies probably had a smouldering resentment to this.
His reaction is understandable.

Wait. What?
Is that it? Are you having a laugh, JD? Are you, perchance, “extracting the Michael”?

I have done some rudimentary calculations and seventy-four points as to why you are an idiot for writing this letter come to mind right about now. I will, henceforth and forthwith,address some of these below.

First off, Bakkies was not alone in facing the All Blacks’ Haka that day. There were 14 other players alongside him as the New Zealanders shook their little asses before kick off. If each of those 14 also harboured a smouldering resentment to the dance troupe, they hid it rather better than Bakkies did. And what’s with this “smouldering” stuff, anyway. You make it sound like he hid this supposed resentment rather well, when in fact he chose to smash himself headfirst into the back of Jimmy Cowan’s head.
While he was lying on the floor.
His reaction in this case is clearly not understandable.

Next up, a quick look at his Springbok Hall of Fame page, indicates that Bakkies had played for the Boks against New Zealand on 12 occasions prior to Saturday’s game. That’s 12 previous Hakas he has face without going completely LooneyTunez 2 minutes later. There was also a match against the “Pacific Islands” in 2004 which probably included a little dance up-front as well, because Pacific Islanders like doing that kind of thing.
Given this information, surely no jury would find that the reaction of Mnr Botha was “understandable”.

And then there are “other incidents” involving Bakkies, where he has tried to break players who haven’t even done the Haka. Gio Aplon of the Stormers, for example. Mind you, that was a long while ago – well, two months ago, anyway – in May this year.
I was there that day and watched as Gio (who weighs a mighty 75kg) was illegally taken out of a ruck by Botha (120kg) and was quite broken. Although, he got better.
But Gio hadn’t been dancing and threatening to beat the Bulls to a pulp. His only crime was to be on the end (corner?) of Bakkies’ shoulder in front of the Railway Stand at Newlands.
Maybe Botha had got him confused with one of the cheerleaders, who did have a quick boogie on the pitch before the teams came out.
We’ll probably never know. But since there was no Haka involved, his reaction in this case was far from understandable.

And what of this Haka and the threats and abuse it brings with it, anyway?
Have the All Blacks actually ever beaten anyone to a pulp during a Haka-prefixed game? Only on the scoreboard, methinks (32-12 last weekend).
And is there really any evidence that arms and legs – (is it ok if I use the collective term “limbs” here, JD? Is that alright?) – is there any evidence that limbs have been severed during an All Black game?

I’m no expert on rugby, but I can use Google and I can find no record of traumatic amputation of any limb during an international rugby match involving New Zealand. And that’s 462 games.

Ignoring replacement players and the complications that they would bring to the calculation and therefore working on the basis of 15 opposition players per game (and a rather obvious 4 limbs per player), that’s almost 28,000 limbs that the New Zealanders have – through the medium of dance – allegedly threatened to amputate during rugby matches and a grand total of zero that they’ve actually managed to tear off.

If you or Bakkies had actually done the maths, you’d surely realise that this Haka thing is obviously just an empty threat and nothing to get all wound up about. Sadly, that does mean that his reaction is anything but understandable.

I recognise that this blog post may seem to you to be part of the “injust” “tirade” against Bakkies, but it’s actually not. It’s simply a reasoned response to your foolish action in attempting to explain his foolish action.

And so, JD Bryce, your letter to the Times is therefore declared null and void and you are banned from 9 weeks from writing anything remotely involving rugby to any newspaper.

Save maybe for an apology.

Seen it all before

One of the biggest eye-openers you can have is seeing a story in the press of which you have personal knowledge.
When you read the article, you can marvel at just how inaccurate and mis-representative the reporter or journalist is being.
Applying this new-found enlightenment to other stories in the media can lead to chronic cynicism when reading newspapers or perusing internet news sites. You may suddenly find that you want to take the content with an appropriately sized pinch of salt. Builder’s Warehouse sell 25kg bags of salt for exactly this purpose. Buy a couple – they’ll will last you a week.

Of course, it could be that you just got unlucky and that all the other stories out there are 100% bang on, deadly accurate.
But that seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it?

And it was with a heavy and cynical heart that I read the latest attack on Brazil’s preparations for the 2014 World Cup in the Guardian.

And so to 2014. Three years ago, when Brazil was unveiled as the host of the next World Cup, the country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, promised a tournament so well organised that even his country’s greatest rivals – the Argentinians – would be unable to criticise it. Now, however, even Brazilians are starting to speak out against the lack of progress in stadium construction and infrastructure projects, amid concern over corruption and bad planning and calls for the number of host cities to be cut from 12 to 10.

It’s exactly what they were saying about South Africa 4 years ago. And that’s got me on the phone to my local salt mine.

Because the issues over crime and security were unfounded. The allegations that the stadiums would not be ready or would not be up to standard were nonsense. Our transport system upgrades were completed and well utilised. And when the media realised this, they moved on to more trivial, more foolish stories of snakes, race wars and the like.

I know you’re as thankful as I am that SA stayed free of significant seismological activity during the tournament.

The Guardian article describes Brazil’s 2014 bid as being “ambitious”. Well, good. What were they expecting? Brazil to submit their bid documents detailing six 50-year-old stadiums and hope that visitors will find their way around on foot, noting that it might be a long walk from Rio to some of the stadiums in the north of the country?

And then the dig at the transport infrastructure:

Even in the country’s affluent south-east, motorways are often crater-ridden dual carriageways; in the poorer north-east and mid-west their standard is frequently life-threateningly bad.

Has Tom Phillips actually relied on anything other than hearsay and his own creative licence before reporting that? Because it does sound like much of the stuff I was hearing about South Africa in the (elongated) run-up to the 2010 World Cup. And I know that a lot of that wasn’t actually true – or was at the very least blown out of all proportion. Who could forget Louise Taylor’s nonsense in the… er… Guardian (and which I dealt with ever so briefly at the bottom of this)?

Marcotti wrote of some long, unpleasant drives in the dark after covering matches. Commenting on the lack of dual carriageways and lit highways in certain areas, he described negotiating one road heading towards Jo’burg as “like snorkelling in a sewer filled with squid ink”. Shortly afterwards came the sad news that a German journalist had been killed in a car accident while driving to a Confederations Cup match.

Personally I’d have preferred the 2010 World Cup to have gone to Egypt. Yes, it would have been very hot (although it’s a dry heat) and it would, in places, have been dirty and ultra-chaotic, but it would also have been friendly and welcoming. And, in terms of crime, Egypt is extremely safe. Eyebrows would doubtless have been raised at the potential for organisational mayhem, the nightmarish Cairo traffic and the downtown air pollution, but surely if the Egyptians could build the pyramids they could host a World Cup.

Of course, the Egyptians did host the World Cup back in 4010 BC and it was a highly lauded tournament – but with their abilities as pyramid builders, it was always going to be a success. And this even though many of their roads were very poorly lit.
And South Africa’s success some 6000 years later was achieved despite it going dark at night. Amazing.

But I digress.

Maybe Brazil are behind schedule. Maybe the transport infrastructure is poor. Maybe there is political interference at every level (perish the though that this would occur anywhere else in the world).
But I don’t believe all I read in the newspapers. And I’ve seen what can be achieved in four years and thus I refuse to write them off already. Looking at many of the comments below Phillips’ piece, I can see that a lot of others are losing faith with these stories too.

Of course, when Brazil isn’t ready and the 2014 tournament is in disarray, Phillips will be able to look back and tell us that he told us so. But where is Louise Taylor’s admission that she got it so very hopelessly wrong about South Africa in 2010?

Força, Brasil!

Scapegoat

Oh dear.
Some orange people aren’t very happy.

It seems that they weren’t the ones who won the World Cup last night and they think it’s the referee’s fault.
I don’t agree – they were rubbish and they deserved to lose – but let’s let them have their say.

Arjen Robben, for example:

We sat there in the dressing room and only talked about some of the refereeing decisions.
There were a few things which were hard to take, but there is no point talking about them now.

I can see why Robben was incensed. He made a HUGE error seven minutes from the end of normal time by inexplicably staying on his feet when Carles Puyol appeared to hold him back.
Robben’s decision was inexplicable for two reasons: firstly, that if he had gone down, Puyol would have been sent off, but moreover secondly, that he actually appeared to know how to stay on his feet.
Quite why it took him until 7 minutes before the end of the final game of the tournament to realise he had this ability is another question completely. But football365 agrees with me:

Had Robben gone to ground on the edge of the box when Puyol reached an arm out, Holland could have had a free-kick and Spain could have been reduced to ten. As it was the status quo was retained, and Robben’s complaints deservedly fell on deaf ears. The man goes over so easily, how does he expect to receive decisions when he stays on his feet? Surely a referee can only assume the challenge was incredibly light.
He made the kind of protest that is only made because things didn’t go his way. Imagine if Howard Webb did stop the play before he reached Casillas. He’d have been furious to have been stopped in his tracks. If you let the play go, allowing the advantage, you can’t then come back and send Puyol off. The advantage was allowed, Robben didn’t capitalise. End of story.

But anyway, as Arjen correctly states, there’s no point talking about it now. Although he is.
And so am I. And so is Arjen’s mate, Nigel.

Yep, Dutch number 8 Nigel de Jong was also unhappy, because he felt that the major calls went the Spaniards’ way:

There were a few curious decisions in the game, but that is football.
Football is football, maybe I am a little old school, but I remember the games back in the days when there were worse fouls which never even got booked.

Hang on, Nigel – are you saying worse fouls than this? [youtube]

Because if you are, I’m struggling to recall at what point in the “old school” of football this sort of thing went unpunished. Perhaps you’re getting it confused with the old school of Tae Kwon Do, in which “one point is scored for an effective attack to the trunk“. Or perhaps you’re just looking for a scapegoat.
Let’s bring in the  impartial football365 again:

Dutch fans who feel they have been hard done by should hold their tongues, frankly. I thought Howard Webb’s biggest two mistakes were not sending off players bedecked in orange. Nigel de Jong’s almost neck high, straight-legged assault on Xabi Alonso was nothing short of a red card. There is dangerous play, and there are tackles which you know when you commit them are capable of seriously injuring someone. This was in the latter category, and should have resulted in Holland being down to ten a long, long time before the game’s conclusion.

But if Webb sends him off then the Dutch are down to 10 men for most of the game and the match as a spectacle is ruined.
And who gets the blame for that? Well, Howard Webb, of course. It’s a classic no-win situation. Which Spain won.

The Dutch certainly didn’t hold back with their challenges and they can have no complaints with the number of yellow cards (and the one red) they received. But of course, in any big game, emotions run high and games don’t come any bigger than this. And when your own frailties are exposed and you let yourselves, your country and your fans down, then you’re bound to say some things you might regret later.
Blaming the referee conveniently deflects the attention away from a poor Dutch effort and attempts to trivialise their approach to the game, which was nothing short of thuggish. World Cup finals are rarely pretty – there’s too much at stake (compare and contrast the free flowing football of the “no pressure” third place game the previous evening) – but this one was at least full of incident.

That the Oranje caused most of that incident and then tried to blame it all away on the referee is a disgrace.

UPDATE: Not overly dramatic from Kevin McCarra in the Guardian.

Holland were already being rebuked prior to the final but these events were on a wholly different scale and Fifa should take additional action considering the harm done to the culmination of a tournament that means so much around the globe.
After a World Cup final of so toxic a nature the stadium is in need of decontamination more than the regular clean-up.

And some good stuff from Richard Williams in the same place.

UPDATE 2: And the more I read that football365 post, the better it gets.

Counter Attacks

“When I’m feeling blue, all I have to do, is take a look at you, then I’m not so blue.”
So sang Phillip “it is here” Collins in his hit Against All Odds.
Quite why he couldn’t find another word to rhyme with “blue”, particularly with the massive lexicographical selection available to him, I have no idea.
But it doesn’t matter, because that’s not relevant to this blog post at all.

No, because I meant to start (and sing along with me here):
“When I’m wondering what to write about here, all I have to do, is take a look at the letters page of the Southern Suburbs Tatler, then I don’t have to wonder what to write about anymore.”
It’s like Phil Collins’ efforts, but far more pertinent to this blog post, because it’s exactly what I did (and have done previously). And it was there that I found a letter from P During of Newlands.
It went a little something like this:

Counter Attack
Here is a simple solution to counter Table Mountain muggings (“Mountain Safety Concern”, Tatler, June 17).
Or armed forces must have special people trained in unarmed combat.
Dress some of these people as tourists with valuables such as expensive cameras and watches.
Unsuspecting muggers could then be roughly handled and handed over to the police.
Perhaps people highly skilled in karate would also be prepared to help out.

This issue of muggings on Table Mountain is hugely contentious. People like me lament the fact that each incident (in single figures each year) gets front page news, while the other lot are annoyed that more isn’t made out of it – as if it could be. It’s perfect fodder for the local tabloid though – drama, crime, dismay and the opportunity to prompt letters from P During of Newlands.

In just 5 lines, P During delivers well-considered and powerful advice. You can’t almost see him sitting at home, smoking his pipe and slippers while reading the Tatler’s story on June 17th. He’s thinking that there’s surely some way he can help in sorting this situation out. And then suddenly, it hits him: bring in the army!
“Yes, back in my day, we had to learn what to do when we ran out of bayonets behind enemy lines. A little unarmed combat. Of course, back then you could whip Fritz’s gun and shoot him in the face, but if I suggest that, they probably won’t publish my letter.”

And he’s right, of course. But no-one is fooled by his clever line “Unsuspecting muggers could be roughly handled”. Despite the fact that P During is – in all likelihood – a lovably harmless 80-something year old granddad, that line is clearly unsubtle code for “Unsuspecting muggers could have seven bells of sh!t kicked out of them” (sorry Mum).

But it’s his last line that takes the biscuit. It’s almost as if he thinks that having members of the Special Forces beating up muggers in Skeleton Gorge might not be enough. And while he doesn’t actually use the ‘N’ word, we all know what he’s thinking.
Yes, P During of Newlands wants Ninjas on the slopes of Table Mountain.

And it might not be a bad idea, but it will never happen. Because ninjas (as we all know) are covert agents or mercenaries of feudal Japan. And Table Mountain is a National Park. There is no way that the authorities will allow an alien species to be introduced to the area. Last time they did that with the Himalayan Tahrs, they changed their minds and went out and shot them.
Release some ninjas and if you change your mind, you’ve got problems. Ninjas would obviously be a whole lot more difficult to locate than tahrs once they were released on the mountain.
And you’d have to find some very brave or very stupid marksmen to go after them. While tahrs are known for their sure-footedness and small horns, ninjas are known for stealth and their ability to kill people very efficiently. Get too close when hunting tahrs and while you might get butted, you’re unlikely to find a shuriken embedded in your forehead, flung by a hand you never even saw.

I don’t have the answer to these over-publicised attacks, but I will be writing to the Tatler this week to advise the National Park Board against deploying ninjas for the reasons I give above.

Dear Uruguay

Dear Uruguay,

As an honourary South African, may I first apologise for the huge amount of anti-Uruguayan sentiment that has been demonstrated amongst the locals here since Luis Suarez’s last-gasp handball against Ghana. Labeling the whole team as “cheats”, “scum” and “cheating scum” due to the instinctive actions of one player is rather foolish and unnecessary in my humble opinion. Equally as bad are the appalling and unamusing puns around the name of your country: “Ur-a-gay” and “Ur-a-gone”, which of course, you’re not, although last night’s defeat means that you will be exiled to Port Elizabeth for the weekend. I’m sorry about that too.

The popular perception amongst the nouveau riche of footballing knowledge (and by nouveau, I mean “I’ve learnt everything there is to know about soccer in the last 4 weeks”) seems to be that Suarez was at fault for Ghana’s exit. However, this is surely only the view of those who watched that game through African tinted spectacles. When viewed through neutral eyes, Ghana’s defeat was actually due to the fact that they couldn’t score any goals – especially from the penalty spot.
I’ve done some rudimentary calculations and it appears that statistically speaking, 85% of penalties are scored. In that quarter final, Ghana managed to pop a whole 40% in. Quite how that pitiful inaccuracy has been twisted and turned into apparently being Mr Suarez’s fault is somewhat beyond me.

The cheating allegations continue. That your players dive in order to get fouls. Like dear Luis again, for example, when SA goalie Itumeleng Khune tripped him up. Although, in fairness, that one was because he was tripped up by Itumeleng Khune, rather than because he dived.
But anyway: diving. It’s ugly and I dislike it.  We all do. Uruguay are, of course, the only nation whose players do this. Well, apart from Arjen Robben and Robin van Pear-See of Holland. And Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal. So Uruguay, Holland and Portugal, then. And maybe Fernando Torres a bit as well. So add Spain too.
(We’d probably include France, but they weren’t really here long enough for anyone to notice.)
But Uruguay are definitely the biggest cheats at diving, because South African fans say so (while conveniently ignoring Teko Modise’s pathetic 3m springboard antics).

And talking of Teko, we can also add to this growing list of reasons that we hate each and every one of the 3,500,000 inhabitants of your country so very much, the fact that you effectively ended Bafana Bafana’s dreams of World Cup glory by comprehensively outplaying them and scoring three more goals that they did in Pretoria on the 16th. How dare you?
Of course, that’s what you came here for – to win as many games as possible.
But against the host nation? Don’t you study history at all?
Do you not recall how Germany declared war on Italy after their semi-final defeat in 2006? How Japan refused several shipments of rose-flavoured candy after Turkey knocked them out in 2002? Or how France didn’t actually take any action whatsoever after they weren’t beaten on home soil in ’98?
No Uruguay. You got lucky when South Africa just decided not to like you very much after that 3-0 drubbing in Tshwane. We could have gone a lot further, like giving your kids vuvuzelas.
(Note to parents: Just. Don’t.)

And then there’s the personal insults. Mainly about Diego Forlan’s hair. Obviously, none of the other players playing in the World Cup here have silly hair (Siphiwe Tshabalala) (cough) so this makes Diego a prime target. This is exacerbated by his annoying habit of scoring really good goals. Siphiwe only struggled with that goalscoring issue rather briefly way back when.

All in all, it’s clear to see why some South Africans have suddenly discovered this hatred from all things Uruguayan. The spirit of Ubuntu only goes so far and the bottle had obviously run dry by the time we got down to U in the alphabet. Wait til you see what they  have in store of the Zimbabweans next week – a bit of booing and some hairstyle abuse is going to seem like a game against Bafana… er… I mean like a walk in the park compared with what they’re going to get.

All in all, I think you were hard done by. Quite what people expected you to do when faced with opposition football teams in an international football tournament escapes me. I would have stopped that shot with my hand if I’d have been on the line that night. So would David Beckham, so would Lionel Messi, neither would Robert Green.
That’s just part and parcel of football. And that’s probably why so many people here just don’t get it.

UPDATE: Some more posts on this, from Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Nell.

UPDATE 2: More – Incoming from Jacques:
From a good football blog I’ve just discovered:

Then, Ghana. This is my sixth World Cup, and I have watched a lot of football over the last 20 years. (Time I’ll never get back, Isuppose.) And I’ve never seen an ending weirder, more arbitrary and more cruel than the freakshow of missed penalties and evil-doing rewarded that brought the Black Stars’ inspirational, continent-uniting underdog run to an end. I loved it.
See, Ghana distinguished itself by becoming the only African team that knows how to get a result, come what may. Dating back (at least) to their cold-blooded 2006 elimination of the United States, they’ve always been willing to do the business. Dive in the box? Waste a little time with a fake injury? Why not? It’s a Man’s Game, after all.
Football’s message to Ghana: “Oh, you think you’re hardboiled? Meet Luis Suarez’s hand!” I’ve been wracking my brain for a Hand-of-God-style sobriquet for Suarez’s last-second “save”—someone will get there, I’m quite sure—but in the end, it was just the kind of bizarre intervention that twists history one way and not another. Plan all you want, and you cannot plan for Suarez’s hand.
Sorry, Black Stars—but you had 120 minutes to win it, and you didn’t, so fare thee well.

He’s right, you know?