Ponderings of the Man from Mpofana...

You know, there are national team kits & club team kits that look so fitting. The Serbia, France & USA kits for the FIBA World Cup looked great. I'm not a Manchester United fan but their 2024/25 season home team shirts are alright. AC Milan looks great, Real Madrid needs some work with the number prints, Liverpool is ok...  Lots of people complained when Orlando Pirates brought out the red strip & I couldn't understand because it looked really good. Adidas, Puma, Reebok & Nike gave us some of the best kits in the recent past. Adidas Euro 2008 kits were great, the kits & number prints for the 2010 World Cup were ok & in 2014 the kits were great. Puma gave us the best African kits in the late 2000s also, I still remember that number design with the little line shadow for Ivory Coast, Ghana & Egypt - those AFCON shirts were iconic. With Junior Agogo (R.I.P.) & Michael Essien looking like real national heroes. Puma also gave us really good designs wi...

A while back US sprinter, Noah Lyles, mocked the USA's sports trend of calling their national champions "World Champions" & he was right in doing so but the manner he did it rubbed many in US sports the wrong way. How can any team call itself "World Champions" if it has not beaten every team in the world? This led me down a rabbit hole, now I'm questioning how a knockout competition is a real test of ability? You beat the teams that beat other teams only once & not consistently & you sometimes don't beat every team you face. Knockout competitions are often just one leg, surely they could - at least - have two legs. A knockout competition where teams play each other just once almost seems cowardly. If FIFA World Cup qualifiers are like mini leagues, why can't the FIFA World Cup itself be a sort of league?  Imagine this; it's FIFA World Cup 2022, thirty-two teams divided into four groups. Eight teams each group & each national team ...

National teams really cheat themselves & sell themselves short at times by not selecting their best players. In the football world;  • Benni McCarthy not playing for South Africa in the 2010 FIFA World Cup,  • Clarence Seedorf not playing in his prime at several international tournaments for the Netherlands,  • Ruud van Nistelrooy not being included for the 2010 FIFA World Cup  • Romario not being selected for the 2002 FIFA World Cup & a whole lot more exceptional players that were just not selected for their national teams.  This self-inflicted injustice also happens in the basketball world with the most notable instances being the USA & Serbia. Serbia recently won bronze in the 2024 Olympics & silver in the FIBA Basketball World Cup in 2023. The Serbia team included some notable exclusions for both tournaments, the USA amended their selection faults & won gold at the 2024 Olympics but we can only wonder what could've happened if Serbia sel...

I think I've mentioned this before of how when I played a sport in my teen years, I almost seemed to lose sense of where I was or even a sense of existing... I was a very shallow teenager, I just did not have the strengthened character that I obtained in my twenties. I was what they call "trying to much" in my younger years, trying too much to be accepted & ultimately just looking like a fraud. I was never sure of myself at a lot of times because I believed things should be straight-forward & didn't get that there were nuances, envies & hatreds hidden in people. So, while I believed I could've been better at every sport I played... some people just didn't want me to succeed... It is only in recent times that I've calmed down & realised that I could've been a much better athlete if I just relaxed & stuck to what I knew. And of course, "If I knew back then what I know now, I would've become a professional athlete." - Mth...