Jan van Riebeeck

The best way to get South Africans to do something is to tell them not to do it, which may be good news for football.

South Africans are generally a perverse lot — the best way to get us to do something is to tell us not to do it — perhaps it will work out that way. Perhaps two years of being deprived of the right to go and watch the football in the flesh will bring back the punters who had never set foot in the stands before Covid-19 started just because they now can. Television revenue has chugged along nicely — having a literally captive audience will do that — along with shirt sales, while the cleaning bills have been way lower and there’s been no paying security staff to watch over empty stands for a full two years. I’d probably never have made it out of Belfast, and would have ended up at the Harland & Wolff shipyard along with my cousins, Young Martin and Jim, or on the dole like my cousin George, or in Long Kesh, like my cousin Billy, or a combination of the three. The last PSL game I went to could have been taking place under lockdown regulations — it wasn’t, but there were way more security guards and cleaners than paying punters, which may explain the silence of the team owners for the past two years. Imagine that the Dromedaris and the Goode Hoop sank in Table Bay, and Jan and the boys were eaten by great white sharks, all blood and ringlets in the water, rather than making it to shore and behaving like them.