All eyes on Africa

Thankfully, the overplayed re-run of the Zaire player hastily kicking the ball away against Scotland in the 1974 World Cup clash is no longer the resounding image of African football.

The evolution of televised sport and the Premier League has certainly brought me up to speed with some of the most exciting football now being played on the planet.

All sporting eyes will currently be on Africa as the 26th edition of the Africa Cup of Nations (Ghana 2008) has kicked off in Ghana and it promises to be the most entertaining edition ever. I was one of the millions of fans from across the world that tuned in to see the host team win 2-1 game against Guinea, at the sold-out Ohene Djan Stadium in Accra. Sully Muntari rifled a stunning 25-yard shot into the top corner in the dying minutes of the game to set the capacity crowd alight.

Ghana 2008 is Africa’s greatest football fiesta. The competition brings the best of the continent’s football talent together for a 16 team scintillating four week festival of fantasy football.

Well known stars from European Leagues such as Didier Drogba, Samuel Eto’o, Michael Essien, Federic Kanoute, Obafemi Martins and others, will be joined by new emerging talent like Amine Chermti from Tunisian club Etoile Sahel, Clifford Mulenga from South African club side Pretoria University and Teko Modise who also plays in South Africa with the Orlando Pirates.

Ghana start as favourites, but it is expected to be one of the closest fought competitions in years with teams such as Cameroon, Nigeria, Cote D’Ivoire and reigning champions Egypt expected to mount strong challenges. In addition North African powers Tunisia and Morocco should not be taken lightly.

It should be remembered that 13 different nations have liftied the trophy over the last 50 years. Therefore, all the competing teams will be focusing on getting through the next four weeks and emerging on the hollowed turf of the Ohene Djan Stadium on February 10th with the chance to call themselves the best team in Africa.

For comprehensive coverage of the Africa Cup of Nations.

HOSANA are the official merchandise suppliers of the Kick It Out campaign.

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Wired

A couple of years ago at All Star Weekend, I ran into my next door neighbour from college for the first time in more than a decade. Baseball prospect Darryl Handy had returned to his home city of Baltimore in Maryland after poor luck with injurïes had ruïned his pro prospects. I took the opportunity to do some research on one of my favourite programmes on television, HBO's The Wire. I posed "Handyman" the qüestion, "“Is B-More really like it is on The Wire?”

In an instant he described (C)harm City. A place of 600,000 plus people with a defeated, ailing police force mired in scandal, an ever-growing gang presence, a grossly underfunded public school system, scores of murders, a massive crack and heroin market/problem and good old-fashioned gentrification worsening disparities in an already balkanized metropolis (read:
Guilford, the city’s priciest housing market, adjacent to Greenmount Ave., B-More drug and homicide hotspot).

Yes, it can be like that -and it is.

This week to help kick off the final act of The Wire saga, New York City will host the official CD release party for the The Wire: And All The Pieces Matter, and The Wire: Beyond Hamsterdam, the double-disc soundtrack commemorating the show’s five years on HBO.

Both albums drop on January 8th and feature tracks from artists such as Solomon Burke, Steve Earle, Masta Ace and Paul Weller, as well as B-More hip-hop and Club titans Bossman, Ogun, Rod Lee and Mullyman, to name a few.

The Wire website.

The Wire article in The Telegraph.

A Guyanese Tragedy

On my recent shopping trip to New York City, I was browsing one of the Borders book stores and came across the '101 Most Infamous Criminals in U.S. History' section. I was kind of blown away by the reference to Rev. Jim Jones Sr. and the Guyanese tragedy which happened 29 years ago this month. Having visited the South American home of my parents for the second time this year, I still find it hard to comprehend how my country is linked to one of the worst massacres ever. Even more remarkable is the role basketball played in saving a few lucky young men who survived.

In the mid-1970s the charismatic, and manipulative Jones landed in San Francisco, where he used social activism, radicalized rhetoric and elements of old-time religion, like purported acts of faith healing, to whip the multicultural congregation of Peoples Temple into a fervor.

Jones later became a political force in San Francisco politics. Yet when questions were raised about abuses within his Peoples Temple church, he moved his flock to South America and created a would-be utopia, Jonestown, in the jungles of Guyana.

Jonestown was accessible only by boat or plane, so a basketball hoop was erected in the encampment, built on a platform floor in a place originally intended to be a storehouse. For the young men who played there, the game became a kind of organized defiance against the Rev. Jones.

In the late summer of 1978, Jim Jones Jr., then 18, was dispatched to the capital city Georgetown where he would spend three months helping set up basketball initiatives. It was a good PR exercise for Jonestown, and it was a way for some of the young men to play ball. The Jones teams played a number of tournament games, totally oblivious to what was happening in the jungle.

Unbeknown to them back in Jonestown, a cyanide-laced Flavor Aid drink was being prepared and would ultimately be responsible for the death of more than 900 men, women and children in a mass suicide orchestrated by the Rev. Jim Jones also died from a gunshot wound.

Playing basketball had kept the players on the team away from the horror. It saved their lives.