Skip to main content

AFCON 2013: HAIRDOS, DANCE-STEPS AND DODGY CALLS


The Festival of Ginger Dance-steps and Weird Hairdos, better known as AFCON2013, has been on for more than a week and being an African with a fanatical love for football, I think it is only normal I devote this post to CAF’s pre-eminent football completion. This post should have come up last week, but due to dearth of information on the teams cum players, it couldn’t, and after 9 days of football, I have to confess there is as much to write about as describing the features of a unicellular organism.

Luckily, I was able to watch 7 out of the 16 matches played so far and damn right I was lucky, ask those who watched all the matches what their action would be if they were given access to a time-machine, I bet the answer would be a resounding AYE to availing themselves of the opportunity to travel back in time to February 18th. Here are a few snippets as to why: out of the 16 matches played so far, 8 of them were draws (3 were scoreless draws); only 26 Goals have been scored (4 matches account for 14 of those); thousands of sleep-inducing minutes of football have been spent, and a bazillion officiating errors have been recorded. To look on the bright side, a dozen new dance-steps have been demonstrated, and a million hairstyles have been showcased.


Ordinarily, we are all guilty of pessimism when it comes to the land of Africa, anything African, and we Africans, but I have to concede that the pessimism is well-founded this time around. I was one of the few who stuck my neck out for AFCON2013 to be a veritable testament to how far African football has come, but I have to apologise, I was wrong. This logical optimism was based on two major factors: the large contingent of African footballers plying their trade in Europe, and the other far recesses of the world where football development has penetrated; and the huge number of footballers who had taken advantage of new FIFA rules to switch nationality to African countries. But all these seem to count for nothing as the North Africans – Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria – who benefitted most from nationality switch are faring the worst in this tournament.


Officiating has been another sour-point of AFCON2013. There seem to be no consistency to the calls and there is obviously a lack of understanding between Referees and Assistants most of the time. Knotty calls like “active and passive offside” and “goalkeepers handling outside the 18-yard box” have continued to make fools out of match officials, and the players and coaches have started speaking of conspiracies. Nigeria’s Super Eagles, albeit not being a fantastic team, has been at the receiving end of this dodgy decisions, and those were painful to say the least.

Axiomatically, even if the cloud is as dark as Aristide Bance, there would still be a silver lining somewhere, or even golden lining like the hair on his head. The competition has only gone halfway, and it is just getting to the crucial stages where some teams have to remain in South Africa only for sight-seeing, which means the Grade C and D chaffs would have been separated from the Grade B and A chaffs, (if you have ever visited the pre-Fashola Yaba Railway Line and you pretend like you do not understand this, God is watching you in 3D), and things can only improve. Moreso, most of these players come from different teams in different leagues and the philosophies are different, so let us take this to be acclimatization period and hope the cohesion will start manifesting henceforth.

Let us keep the hope alive, things can only get better, and if they do not, the matches would only have reduced, and February 10th would have been closer, let us endure till then. 





Thank You!
God Bless Us All!!
See You Next Time!!!

Twitter: @SirRash
Facebook: Rasheed SirRash Adewusi

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COVID-19 - THE HARD TRUTHS FROM THESE TRYING TIMES

If someone were to tell me in December 2019 that there would be an occurrence in 2020 which would lead to a near collapse of the financial markets, nearly wipe out the global transportation and tourism industry, put almost all the nations of the world on self-imposed lockdown, I mean basically ground the entire world, I would have simply taken the person for a clown, and if they were to insist on keeping their position, I would have recommended a psychiatric evaluation. Such was the strength of my faith and belief in the social, mental, scientific, and technological evolution of humankind that I could not foresee all of us abandoning life as we know it and scampering for shelter far away from other humans as much as possible. Let us face it, the world will never be the same again, even after we have been able to arrest the Covid-19 pandemic, but then, why should it remain the same? The current situation has brought to the fore the indispensability of many of the issues essen...
3 comments
Read more

PER ARDUA AD ASTRA

Air travel is such a kaleidoscope of experiences, serving a flavourful dish with a potpourri of pyscho-social condiments - some spicily educative, some saltily annoying, and others so blandly humbling that it evokes nothing but acceptance. First, we all need to agree that air travel is one of the greatest proofs of the limitlessness of the human spirit. An airplane remains one of the inventions which pushed human advancement to the next frontier, cutting down travel time across the planet, leading to easier and better collaboration, and of course facilitating the growth of the global economy. Interestingly, the ease with which humans readily trust aircrafts to always take us home is a successful psycho-social experiment which should never be taken for granted. For context, we are expected to always look right, look left, and look right again before crossing a road, and for wider roads, we basically mount pedestrian bridges to help us cross, yet this requires less than a minute; but we ...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE PHYSICS OF PRESENCE, AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE LARGER-THAN-LIFE PHENOMENON

We have all felt it - that sudden, inexplicable shift in the atmospheric pressure of a room. A person walks in, and without saying a word, they seem to occupy more cubic centimeters of space than their physical frame should allow. We call them “larger than life.” But what does that actually mean? Unless we are discussing a literal giant or a particularly ambitious parade float, the phrase is a biological impossibility. Yet, we use it to describe the titans of industry, the icons of cinema, and that one uncle who tells stories with enough kinetic energy to power a small “Lagos Estate”. To understand the “larger than life” phenomenon, we have to stop looking at the person and start looking at the space they displace. It is not about size; it is about density, narrative, and the sheer audacity of being seen. In the world of physics, density is mass divided by volume. In the philosophy of persona, being larger than life is often a result of emotional density. Most people live within the...
14 comments
Read more