A FEW minutes before midnight on Wednesday, the article on Sunday Chidzambwa’s leaked audio, in which he was clandestinely recorded taking a swipe at his club’s leadership, was trending on The Herald website more than any other sports story.
It was the second biggest trending story on the newspaper’s website, being beaten to pole position by the proposed one-stop border clearance arrangement at Beitbridge where both human and vehicle traffic is huge. The Mhofu story had generated more than 14 188 hits and attracted a lot of comments and in the process casting a huge shadow on the landmark visit by Brazilian football legend, Rivaldo, which was clearly a more important and bigger story. The rare arrival of a Ballon d’Or winner, former FIFA World Player of the Year, UEFA Champions League winner and World Cup winner on our soil — itself as big a sports story here as they will ever come — was playing second fiddle to Mhofu’s comments in audio recorded secretly without his consent.
The Barcelona legend’s promise to use the vast network of contacts he established during his hugely successful adventure in Europe to try and open avenues for talented local footballers break into the elite leagues on that continent had been dwarfed — in terms of the interest it was generating — by Mhofu.
Rivaldo’s promise to play a part in helping shape the future of our football, with his pledge to try and help the next generation of our footballers break into Europe being aptly made during an address at an academy in Harare had — just a few minutes before midnight on Wednesday — generated only two comments. For the first time, in an illustrious career in which he touched the heavens, Rivaldo had to contend with playing second fiddle to a secretly recorded message about someone who never played football outside this country, the chaos at his modest domestic Premiership side and the turbulence devouring its soul.
A legendary footballer who, just two months ago, was on the front page of Marca — the dominant daily newspaper in Spain with a readership of about 2,3 million — now found his first visit to Zimbabwe being eclipsed, among the online readers of this country’s biggest daily newspaper, by a recording about ZPC Kariba. When you consider that it’s rare for Barcelona legends to find their way onto the front page of Marca — given the sports newspaper’s unapologetic bias towards Real Madrid — for Rivaldo to gatecrash his way onto that front page on August 15 this year, speaks volumes about his great profile
After all, this is a player who left Spanish football 15 years ago and for him to be still newsworthy today, to the extent of forcing his way onto the front page of that country’s biggest daily newspaper, should tell us of the enduring appeal of this Brazilian legend. The journalists at Marca went 20 years back into time, revisiting Rivaldo’s protracted move from a Deportivo La Coruna reluctant to sell him to a Barcelona side desperate to have him in 1997, as they reflected on the drama that was stalking Barca’s reluctance to release Neymar to a Paris Saint-Germain side which badly wanted him.
“Two decades on from the soap opera we take a look at one of the GREAT Brazilian No. 10s in history,’’ Marca said in their article in August this year and that they even used the word GREAT to describe a former Barca player was in itself quite extraordinary. But, somehow Rivaldo found himself being overshadowed by a recording, done clandestinely, in which Mhofu appeared to castigate his club’s leadership. Well, this football legend was in town this week, but rather than his mere presence provoke boundless interest within domestic football’s family, with every word he said being the subject of intense scrutiny, what we found appealing was a leaked clandestinely recorded audio of Mhofu questioning the professionalism of the ZPC Kariba leadership.
What we chose to feast on were the contents of that tape, itself just a revelation of the chaos that has taken a modest Kariba side 20 steps backwards in recent years, after they came close to winning the league championship a few years ago. That this was largely a conversation about a Kariba community was lost on all of us, being a people whose appeal can now only be lured by negativity and controversy, while a national story — in which one of the finest footballers of all-time was saying he could open doors for the next generation of our soccer stars into Europe — was lost in the mist of our fascination with the negative stuff.
Admittedly, Mhofu — because of his big profile — has a way of generating interest, whatever he says or does, but to argue that his opinion on the state of the leadership of ZPC Kariba could become bigger news than Rivaldo saying he could help scores of our teenage boys secure contracts in Europe where their football could be better developed, just doesn’t seem right for me. But, then, that’s what we are, what we have become, a people for whom anything that hasn’t a touch of negativity and is pregnant with hope and a dosage of positivity, doesn’t appeal to us anymore.
AMID ALL THIS, I WONDERED, WHAT IF RIVALDO HAD SAID NO?
And, as I wondered long and hard this week about how we have come this far, as a people, I then drifted to the possibility that, maybe, given our fascination with negativity, the real excitement among us could probably have been generated by Rivaldo rejecting Sports Minister Makhosini Hlongwane’s invitation to visit our country.
Like Rivaldo saying I can’t come down there to Zimbabwe because I won’t be able to withdraw any of my money from your ATMs given those cash-vending machines have long stopped supplying American dollars upon a client’s request. Like Rivaldo saying I won’t come to your country because I don’t want to end up being sucked into the politics that we have left to stalk and poison anything that we do in this beloved motherland of ours.
Like Rivaldo saying that like the English cricket team, who haven’t toured here for more than a dozen years and even forfeited a World Cup match against the Chevrons that had been scheduled for Harare in 2003, I won’t come there because I consider myself very, very special. Like Rivaldo saying I won’t come to Harare because, having played my football in Barcelona and Milan, the fashion capital of the world, a trip to a Harare whose streets are now being choked by informal traders isn’t the kind of city that appeals to me for a trip halfway across the world.
Like Rivaldo saying that, having spent some of my time in Miami in the United States since my retirement from the game, I don’t have any reason to fly halfway across the world to spend a day in a Harare where touts now dominate the streets landscape and, in a very unfortunate situation a few days ago, some of them even harassed a passenger to his death. Like Rivaldo saying that, having read all the criticism that was unduly piled on Patrick Kluivert and Edgar Davids on the social media by some people who began attacking the duo for coming to Harare and falsely accusing them of being paid a fortune for that visit, at a time when money is scarce in the country, he didn’t want to be caught in that web of hostile criticism for something he had never received.
Like Rivaldo saying that, given the controversy that surrounded the last time a group of Brazilian footballers came here to Zimbabwe to play the Warriors in a 2010 World Cup warm-up match, he didn’t feel — given the way he is highly protective of his image — this was the best country for him to come to.
Like Rivaldo probably saying that because the Zimbabwean authorities barred Zodwa Wabantu from coming here to perform at the Carnival, because of concerns over her dress code, and all the storm it created on social media, he would not come to Zimbabwe in protest over what he felt was an attack on the South African socialite’s freedom of dressing. Maybe, that’s what we had been hoping for, to provoke interest among ourselves, so that we jump onto the bandwagon and start to feast on the controversy, throwing bricks at each other, finding a lot of joy in the negativity that would have been generated by all that, inundating Twitter, inundating Facebook and clogging WhatsApp with our messages in which we would be laughing at ourselves.
“Rivaldo, kunyepa, haangauye kunyika yakadai,’’ we would have been trending on Twitter, singing on Facebook Live, and sending WhatsApp exploding with our hashtags from #nyikayeseirikunyara to some crazy ones that just come up along the way. Don’t tell me Rivaldo is just a professional footballer who doesn’t dwell into anything to do with politics because that will be a big lie. After all, on May 8 last year, on the eve of the global Olympics party rolling into Brazil, Rivaldo made headlines around the world — from the New York Times to the Washington Post and from the British media to the Australian press — with this statement on his official social media account.
“Things are getting uglier here every day,” Rivaldo wrote, noting that a 17-year-old woman had been killed on Saturday in a shootout in Rio de Janeiro, where the Olympic Games were set to be held in just three months’ time. I advise everyone with plans to visit Brazil for the Olympics in Rio to stay in their country of origin. Your life will be in danger here. This is without even speaking about the state of public hospitals and all the Brazilian political mess. Only God can change the situation in our Brazil.” Of course, despite Rivaldo’s strong reservations, the global Olympic movement travelled to Rio for the world’s biggest sporting festival and the Games were a huge success, with Brazil’s gold-medal triumph in the men’s football tournament providing a fitting cherry on the top.
But, the point is, Rivaldo came to this country, shaming those who were waiting for his non-arrival to provide them with ammunition to fight their wars, silencing those who had been waiting for his no-show to use it for their agendas and shaming those who were praying that he fails to arrive for one reason or another. Crucially, he didn’t portray himself as this superman, who has the FIFA World Player of the Year and the Ballon dÓr in his trophy cabinet, but as a humble human being who appeared happy to be in our company, happy to visit those kids at an academy in Harare and play some football with them and happy to share with them the secrets of what makes one to become a superstar footballer.
THE SUPERSTAR, THE HUMILITY, THE LESSONS, THE BACKGROUND
To appreciate just how really good Rivaldo was, even before he turned into one of the star players for Brazil in 2002 and the frightening hurdles he cleared to become the best on the globe — you need to read what some of the globe’s finest football writers said about him when he was at the very peak of his athletic powers.
“He combines to dazzling effect the two essential qualities of the ideal footballer — artistry and efficiency. No one in the world scores more beautiful goals, more often, than Rivaldo,” John Carlin, writing for The British Guardian newspaper in June 2002, noted.
“And, by any objective measure, the European and World Player of the Year in 1999, the owner of the most lethal left foot in football, is quite right to be indignant.
“Never mind his average of 20 goals a season in the Spanish League or the far from negligible fact that he has been Barcelona’s top scorer against Real Madrid over the past five years, his performance in one game, just one of the more than 200 games he has played for Barcelona, ought to have persuaded a grateful city to erect a monument in his honour on the Plaza de Catalunya.
“Even though he is on record as having claimed that he had a special fondness for mathematics when he was at school, the evidence shows that Rivaldo did not exactly benefit from a privileged education. He grew up exceedingly poor, even by the standards of South American football players.
“He suffered from serious malnutrition as a child, which perhaps explains his amazingly bandy, stick-man legs. As a boy (‘I will never forget the hunger I used to feel,’ he has said) he would supplement the meagre family income by selling drinks and sweets on the beach.
“When he was 15 his father was run over and killed. To get to his first training sessions at his local football club he would walk 10 miles each way.”
Or what another football writer, Simon Kuper, also writing for The Guardian in September 1999 said about this Brazilian athlete.
“There is something of the slum about many great Brazilian footballers — Garrincha, with his legs of unequal length, Pele, who helped Brazil win the World Cup in 1958 when some elderly black Brazilians, following the game on the wireless, could still recall working as slaves, the undersized Romario and the buck-toothed Ronaldo,” Kuper wrote.
“The latest great Brazilian, Rivaldo of Barcelona, belongs in the same line. He grew up poor in Recife, lost his father to a bus accident when he was 15, lost his front teeth to malnutrition and at 27 looks like an old man, with lined skin, deep eye-sockets and false teeth.
“Rivaldo passes the ball so rarely that a coach once sent him to a psychologist. Rivaldo has become untouchable. So popular are his replica shirts that when he asked Nike if he could buy 50 for friends, the manufacturer admitted it had none left. In the Brazilian team, he has replaced Ronaldo as the central figure.”
Or what Mike Lee, writing for the Club Football website in April 2002, said of him.
“Football supporters the world over delight in debating the same question: who is the world’s greatest player. For many fans Vitor Borba Ferreira, otherwise known as Rivaldo, is the only player who merits this title,” Lee wrote.
“If winners’ medals are a deciding factor, there are numerous players with better claims to the title. But in terms of pure footballing genius — the ability to astound opponents and spectators with moments of spontaneous breathtaking skill, to score and create wondrous goals from virtually anywhere on the pitch — then Rivaldo is the only candidate.
“Add triumph in the face of adversity to the equation and the man who followed such greats as Pele and Zico into Brazil’s hallowed number 10 jersey becomes hard to overlook.
“Born into stark poverty, the hardship of his childhood almost ruined Rivaldo’s dream. As a child he lost teeth decayed by malnutrition, and his poor diet left him dangerously thin, bow-legged and muscularly underdeveloped for his height.
“Crucially, he maintained the determination to succeed as a major footballer, despite the doubts of coaches at his first club Paulista who feared that he would be too frail to withstand the rigours of the professional game.” This is the same superstar, whose story should be an inspiration to many of our brothers who believe they have made it when they have not even started, whose story should be an inspiration to thousands of our teenage stars cursing their fate of being born poor that they can ultimately make it, who was in this country this week where he preached the gospel of discipline, focus and determination.
At a time when we all wondering what happened to Denver Mukamba, what happened to Evans Gwekwerere, why Ronald Sibanda’s talent didn’t take him to the big leagues, we had the privilege of hearing it from the one who made it, as our official guest, but — for some strange reason — his words of advice were not trending. His story wasn’t the one everyone was reading, instead we were all feasting on the negativity of a clandestinely recorded audio clip featuring Mhofu about the ZPC Kariba affairs.
Poor us, are we a cursed lot, really?
On a lighter note, today is a unique day -7-10-2017 (7102017) and right to left and left to right the numbers are same. It is called a ‘palindrome’ like 9449, 121, 1331, 14641.
To God Be The Glory
Come on Warriors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Khamaldinhooooooooooooooooo!
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