Trail of the Lion King

Saturday was Cup Final day, not just in England, but in South Africa too. Or rather it was Nedbank Cup Final day. I’ve no idea if Nedbank are an international bank, but if they are then they should open some branches in Scotland. I’m sure that they’d be very popular.

It’s a few weeks since I’ve seen a football game over here, what with the trip to the UK and then my kids coming over here for a visit. They’d have been happy to go to a match or two, but unfortunately none of the fixtures fell right. They did ok for wildlife stuff though.

I’m sure those sticks will be adequate.

There isn‘t a permanent venue for the Nedbank Cup Final and the South African FA wait until the finalists are known before announcing which ground will host the game. This year it was the Moses Mabhida stadium in Durban that got the nod. That worked out pretty well for Jen and I as we’d yet to get to that part of the country.

The Moses Mabhida Stadium.

I’d seen plenty of notices in the football paper giving details of overnight coach trips from Johannesburg for Pirates fans. I’m getting a bit old for that sort of thing though, maybe I’ve always been too old for it, and so we took a one hour flight to Durban instead.

Arriving by air allowed us to notice just how green the land around Durban is. It’s a bit of a contrast from the clay and rocks of the Gauteng area. It was a lot warmer than Gauteng too, or at least it seemed like it as we sat out in the hotel garden for lunch.

Our hotel was one of those near the stadium.

It promised to be an interesting final, with Wits University, or the Clever Boys as they are nicknamed, being good enough to have finished third in the Premier league, whilst ‘bigger club’ Orlando Pirates had already lost in three cup finals over the season, including the African Champions League.

I initially wasn’t really sure which team I favoured, either with heart or head. They appeared to be quite evenly matched on the field and my usual preference for the bigger club to come unstuck was balanced against the thought that no team should lose four finals in a season.

It remember how sickening it was when the Boro lost two finals in 1997 and then another the following March, but four in a season? No, you can’t have that.

It was probably the Pirates fans that clinched my temporary allegiance. I reckon that they would rival the Kaizer Chiefs nationally in terms of numbers, but they are streets ahead in the characters that they have turning up at the games. They’ve got that crossed-arm salute too, that even the players did before the game acknowledging their supporters.

A couple of Pirates fans.

I’d read that the 54,000 seater stadium had sold out, but fortunately we’d bought our sixty rand tickets a few days earlier. That’s around three and a half quid. Not bad for a cup final. I put more than that in the donations bucket at the recent Alan Hood Memorial Trophy final and that‘s for teams competing in the thirteenth tier of English football. I suspect that the tickets for the Arsenal v Hull game at Wembley will have been a little more expensive too.

There were plenty of empty seats as we went through the turnstiles with around half an hour to go to kick-off, but the stadium continued to fill up throughout the whole of the first half and beyond. By the end, there were only really the seats in front of the executive boxes that were empty, whilst in places people were sat in the aisles or stood blocking the exits.

The Moses Mabhida stadium is a newish ground, built for the World Cup and whilst it has a fancy arch that you can zipline from when there isn’t a game on, I wasn’t impressed with the distance between the pitch and the stands. It’s as if they planned for a running track, but then just didn’t bother. If you are going to build a football stadium, particularly for a World Cup, then just build a football stadium with the stands close to the pitch.

It’s an arch.

There weren’t many chances early on, with Wits taking the lead half an hour in. At that point the Pirates fans around us seemed to be expecting the worst. It wasn’t surprising really after the season that they’ve had.

I should have taken the camera with the zoom lens.

The Pirates coach is renounced for bollocking his players and on this occasion the half-time hairdryer treatment did the trick. Within eight minutes of the re-start Orlando were level and they quickly went on to add another couple of goals.

There was a collective sense of relief from the Pirates fans as their team ran out the clock whilst the Wits players took out their frustration in a series of scuffles.

Fourth time lucky.

The full time whistle sparked an entertaining pitch invasion as a couple of hundred fans celebrated victory by dodging the stewards and vaulting over the electronic advertising boards. As it is the world over, most of them couldn’t resist holding their arms out ‘airplane style’ as they weaved their way across the turf.

I think that probably brings the South African football season to a close for me. There are a few lower division play-off games still to take place but I don’t think that we will get to any of them. Still, it’s not long to the World Cup.

I haven’t bothered writing about Boro games previously, but with this now being a general sporting blog I thought, why not? The main reason that I record this stuff is to help me to remember what I’ve seen and whilst one Boro game does tend to blur into another these days, it can’t do any harm. There’s also a possibility that the photos could be interesting in twenty years time or so if blogs still exist then.

My son Tom and I drove to Middlesbrough and parked up near the University. It’s where we used to park when the games had much bigger crowds, but as we walked towards the stadium it occurred to me that we could have parked in any number of much closer places. It struck me how few people were making their way to the match. The crowd seemed to have dropped significantly since my last game in September 2013, much more so than the official attendance figures would suggest.

The busker was still at the underpass, despite the likely drop in his takings. Sometimes I give him money. It’s a karma thing, to try to buy us a result. This was a meaningless end of season game though and as a win wouldn’t have made much difference to anything, he got bugger all.

He probably did quite well ten years ago.

The lack of a crowd was just as noticeable at the stadium and we didn’t need to queue for tickets. We didn’t need to give names and addresses either when we bought them, which is a first, I think, since the move to the Riverside.

Tom’s been coming to the match with me, on and off, since his first game at Ayresome Park as a two year old. The attendances and the league position have gone full circle since those days in the early nineties with the glory years in between starting to feel like something that happened somewhere else.

Half past two.

Our seats were in the South Stand, just behind the Red Faction lads. They get a bit of stick from some of the older fans, but I think a lot of them forget just how low the average age in the Holgate was. The Red Faction drummer must have been practicing over the winter as he’s improved a lot. Or else he’d been replaced by someone who can play. Either way, any atmosphere at all in the ground came from that group of a hundred or so kids.

Barnsley on the attack.

There wasn’t much went on in the first half hour on the pitch. Barnsley needed the win to have a chance of staying up, but it was easy enough to see how they had ended up in the relegation area. The Boro weren’t much better in that opening thirty minutes but we managed to create a few chances as the half drew to a close.

Barnsley took an early lead after the re-start, but were soon pegged back. A couple of goals at the death gave Middlesbrough a win that was probably deserved, but of little consequence.

It’s strange, but the win didn’t mean much to me. It might have been because the season was already over, but I’ve a feeling that I just don’t care that much these days. There were too many players that I wouldn‘t recognise if they passed me in the street with their full kit on and that makes it harder to identify with them.

On the way out.

There was no need to try to beat the traffic as having to queue at the underpass is a distant memory, whilst the lack of congestion on the roads meant that we were back in Norton quicker than I can ever recall managing in the past. I suppose that there are certain advantages to end of season games in the Championship.

As you might have spotted from the team names, this one was a bit of a change from watching the likes of the Kaizer Chiefs and Mamelodi Sundowns. Jen and I were in the UK for Easter and I took the opportunity to watch a game between a couple of teams from the Wearside Combination League. Really? Yes really.

To be more precise, it was the final of the Alan Hood Memorial Trophy and that was pretty much the reason for my attendance. Alan was my Dad’s cousin and my godfather. He died in a car crash in 1987 and the Wearside Combination League re-named the former Blind Institute Cup in his memory.

Alan actually played in the first football match I ever went to. He was captaining Easington Colliery and his dad, my great-uncle Jim, took me along to watch. I reckon it will probably have been the 72-73 season, maybe 73-74. Anyway, Alan came over to talk to us as the teams were warming up and told me that the Vaseline on his eyebrows was to prevent him getting cut when head-butting the opposition players. I, of course, believed every word.

After he stopped playing he became a ref and went on to make the Football League list.  I remember watching him reffing reserve games at Ayresome Park and running the line in an old First Division game against Derby.

Alan as a boy, Uncle Jim is back right.

The venue for the final was the Boldon CA ground and so I took a drive up the A19 with my Dad and my son, Tom. There are two pitches, one of which is used by Northern League Jarrow Roofing and the other by Boldon Colliery Welfare of the Wearside League. This game was on the Boldon Colliery Welfare pitch, but it was still a step up from the places where these teams usually play.

Boldon CA.

The sign on the gate stated that it was £2.50 to get in, but it was charity donations into a bucket instead. The trophy was on display as we went in. It’s an impressive looking effort, but so it should be as it’s a full-size replica of the European Cup.

My Dad with the cup.

The setting didn’t really seem worthy of the trophy. You wouldn‘t expect to win the European Cup on a pitch full of dandelions where the grass was a good inch longer than it should have been. There were about forty people milling around when we arrived with the usual old blokes supplemented by friends and family of the players.

We’d got lucky in a way, with the top two teams in the Wearside Combination having made the final. Sunderland Hendon, who were presumably named to avoid any confusion with the Barnet-based Hendon that play in the Isthmian League, were taking on the equally precisely named Sunderland The Alexandra.

No Champions League theme music on this occasion.

Hendon were kitted out in a very Spanish looking red and white stripes with blue shorts combo with  The Alexandra sporting blue shirts and white shorts. The uneven pitch wasn’t the best surface for passing and so neither side really bothered, preferring just to lump the ball upfield at the earliest opportunity.

There was more squabbling than goalmouth action in the first half, with players turning on their team mates whenever a move broke down, Hendon were marginally the better side though and some dodgy defending from their opponents allowed them to go in at the break a couple of goals up.

A couple of those fans look familiar.

By the time the second half kicked off the crowd had grown to around two hundred. An early penalty to Hendon allowed them to increase their lead to three and it looked to be game over. The Alexandra players certainly thought so and started their post-mortem on the pitch rather than wait until they got to the pub.

Surprisingly, they stopped the arguing just long enough to pull a goal back and set up a frantic final twenty minutes. Being frantic generally isn’t enough though and it wasn’t sufficient to compensate for the panic that set in whenever one of them found themselves anywhere near the penalty box.

Championies.

Hendon hung on for the win and we watched them lift Alan’s trophy. I doubt any of them knew who he was or why he wore Vaseline on his eyebrows. We did, though.

Day two of the Pretoria weekend meant it was the Premier League game between Mamelodi Sundowns and Amatuks. We had a five and a half hour gap between being booted out of our hotel room and the mid-afternoon kick-off so we had a walk along to the Union Building to idle away some of the morning.

Even if you aren’t too familiar with Pretoria landmarks, you still might know the Union Building as it’s the place where Nelson Mandela lay in state last year. There’s not much more going for it though as you can’t go inside. We slogged up the hill, ran the gauntlet of tat sellers at the top and then made our way back down through the gardens. It killed an hour or so but I wouldn’t recommend it. Even the busload of Chinese tourists didn’t seem inclined to hang around.

It’s nothing special.

Fortunately we noticed the nearby Sheraton Hotel and were able to while away the remaining time reading their newspapers before going for the buffet lunch. It’s a lot more enjoyable than pressing your nose up against the glass doors of the Union Building.

The walk in to the stadium was a lot quieter than it had been the previous day and led me to believe that the Sundowns wouldn’t be attracting much of a crowd. The merchandising was more low–key too with most of the sellers setting out their wares on the ground rather than stalls.

It was better than the tat at the Union Building.

We made our way around to the ticket office where the bloke behind the counter kept us and the people behind us waiting as he criticised the appointment of David Moyes at Man United. I find it hard to have any sympathy for Man United fans. They’ve had it good for a long time and are long overdue a relatively fallow spell. Two forty rand tickets and a lecture later we headed for the East Stand, pausing to let the one of the branches of the Mamelodi Supporters Club march past.

They were happy to go the long way around.

The pitch looked in reasonable condition considering that there had been a game of rugby played on it just the day before and the ground staff had made a decent effort at removing or disguising the various sponsor logos that had been painted onto the grass.

Mamelodi, who were dressed up as Brazil, started the better of the two teams but looked vulnerable to being caught on the counter-attack.

View from the East Stand.

I’d estimate the crowd at about a couple of thousand, most of them being Sundowns supporters in the West Stand. There were a hundred or so of the kids who had marched past us before the game behind the goal to our right and maybe a dozen Amatuks fans at the front of the East. The away fans were supplemented by a few Kaizer Chiefs fans who had turned up to cheer on the opposition to their rivals.

Hat Of The Day.

As the first half drew to a close both teams had their chances. It was the Sundowns that broke the deadlock though, a minute before half-time when Laffor headed home unchallenged from five yards out.

Amatuk equalised just after the hour sparking wild celebrations from the alliance of their own and the Kaizer Chiefs fans.

Amtuks fans celebrate Nyondo’s goal.

The visiting supporters joy was short-lived as within a couple of minutes Mamelodi had regained the lead with the third headed goal of the game, this time a glancing effort from Mokoena.

That was it as far as the scoring went, although we were treated to a few wild tackles as the home side hung on for the victory.

This one caused a bit of an uproar.

As we left the ground alongside the Chiefs fans, we had to run the gauntlet for the second time that day, this time it was the Sundown’s under tens fan club making their presence felt and delighting in their victory. Whilst I’d expect the Chiefs to finish on top come the end of the season it was good to see the kids making the most of the win.