Why Ethiopia won the World Cup in 2034
Deji Bryce Olukotun recalls the arc of history-in-the-making that results in a meteoric rise in the fortunes of Ethiopia and more pertinently, its national football squad. 2016 The Ethiopian national team finishes with its worst showing ever in Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers, scoring no goals and securing no points. Across the seas, US […]
Sports Chatter
Simon Kuper discusses the drivel in the drip-feed that is mainstream sports journalism – from rumour and innuendo to occasional smut and toilet humour. The consumer, he argues, is now the consumed, in an arena of social media and sports talk radio – where talking about sport has become ‘independent of sport itself’, and men […]
The Lexicon of Love
The language of football is arguably nowhere more verbose and loquacious than in Brazil – full of the picturesque and partisan, the witty and fantastical. It is where, as James Young writes, the nexus between the twists of life on and off the pitch is revealed. Look behind the words and you might find the […]
Fighting Shadows
Lidudumalingani Mqombothi hails from a place where the game of ukuqula is part of the fabric of village life, and of the passage from boyhood to manhood over generations. Attempts to contemporise a shadow form, in the realm of organised sport in urban centres of South Africa, have failed, while the play on village ground […]
Rumblin’
By Dominique Malaquais Tell It To The World April 1st 1974.[1] Before a room packed with reporters, President Mobutu Sese Seko’s Press Secretary, Bula Mandungu, makes an announcement: on September 25th, the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship will take place in Zaire. In the heart of Kinshasa, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman will face off in […]