Top Eeeeish!
By TBwana
When chaos erupted during the Rangers-Gor match early in the season, I wrote condemning the hooliganism and I jabbed at the marauding youths calling them, in Charles Nyende’s words, louts. I am not Carol Radull so I’m not going to eat my words.
They remain so. But on the night of Wednesday 18th May 2011 we witnessed a whole lot of different occurrences. We witnessed highly inexperienced, indecisive and unprofessional officiating of what I now call Super Eish clash between Gor Mahia and Ulinzi.
Shallow football analysts, some of them senior journalists, say it was a shame seeing Gor fans being watched by the whole continent hurling objects at the match officials and destroying property.
I say they are shallow because they are used to what has now become the norm in some of our Newsrooms; shamelessly copy-pasting sports pages from Euro journals and call it news, sometimes without even attributing to sources.
They don’t delve any further into details. They will make haste in writing screaming headlines chiding Gor fans whenever chaos erupt in stadia; the harsher the heading the better for them.
After the fateful match that Nation’s Odindo Ayieko appropriately described to have ‘ended before it ended’, Supersports’ James Wokabi wrote that ‘Chaos mars super eight clash’, KTN ran a one-sided story titled ‘Gor Mahia: disgrace to Kenyan soccer’, while the notorious Nation on their social site pages updated posts rebuking Gor fans as unruly and destructive. Guilty as charged.
I have never and do not in any way encourage hooliganism of whatever sort. The cinch is, we can write all manner of condemnation against the fans but why can’t we look at what causes their misbehavior?
‘These are fans who don’t take any defeat kindly’ carelessly wrote a journalist. In the name of all saints the chaos erupted when they were denied a goal and a clear penalty, not when they conceded! How many times has Gor been beaten and the fans walk away after the match applauding their players for a good fight? Severally!
Who knew these journalists before 2007or even 2009? Where were they when we used to be fifty fans in the stadium? They are now the loud-mouthed KPL discipline experts while they never said a thing when we were struggling to convince our fans back to the stadium.
They were drowning in liqueur in pubs ‘proudly’ donning ManU-Arsenal jerseys and watching EPL only to copy-paste BBC the following day in their newsrooms. We, Gor fans, literally dragged these scribes back to the stadium. Yes we did!
Back to this Super Eight thing; let’s be sober now and say Gor fans were wrong (which they were anyway for destroying property) and the club shall be charged for it. The question Citizen’s Waihiga Mwaura prudently asked is; what then after the charge? Next week another referee will blunder and be beaten then IDAC charges the club again? It all boils down to officiating.
What sparked off the chaos at Nyayo on that Wednesday was a denied appeal for penalty from a clear handball. It is foolhardy to believe that a sober ref didn’t see it when drunkards on the stands all appealed for a penalty only two minutes after being denied a clean goal.
If the ref is in a bad position to see any foul then he is definitely in the wrong profession.
For heaven’s sake we need to rectify refereeing mistakes because combined with the hard economic situations prevailing in the country, more trouble is in the offing for future games. For crying out loud, these fans are not in church; they are in an open place, a stadium! Do we expect them to applaud refs for errors?
Fans pay to watch the beautiful game, not erroneous referees trembling with decisions and Oguda threatening clubs with IDAC.
Award Ulinzi the match but the tourney loses its hype in the absence of the Green Movement.
Tbwana
..."Wewe ni mtu mdogo sana....na mwenye amekuandika pia ni mtu mdogo sana!".