THE BIGGER THEY COME, THE HARDER THEY FALL!

My dearest readers ... Complications of the New Revolution ... er ... Compliments of the New Year! Now that you have devoured a month’s groceries in two weeks where bekungalaleki, you imbibed litres and litres of the waters of immortality, ranging from the home brewed beer to the finest from the Scottish distillers, welcome back to reality. It’s 2017. It’s Janu-worry – and sekuyalaleka manje because you are as broke as a church mouse, welcome back to the state-of-the-nation sports address.

That’s the beauty of life. We are, to a great extent, humbled by its mysteries and hardened by its cruelties.
But on the football front, the year could not have begun at a better and more intriguing way. As a patriotic Swazi, the growth of our football has been truly heart-warming. It truly feels like patriotism does to the brain as much as sugar does it to the belly – it makes it happy and it makes it soft.

In its maiden season, the Ingwenyama Cup, with a staggering E1.1 million for the winner, did produce some mouth-watering, jaw-breaking moments like of course Sisonkhe FC, a modest Manzini Super league outfit defeat of Manzini Wanderers, but the football romance of the biblical storyline of a brave David slaying a lardy Goliath were few and far between. The country’s best team – by a mile - at the moment, Mbabane Swallows did win it, beating their nemesis Royal Leopard to write another chapter in their chequered life.

A tournament that rivalled the magical SwaziBank Cup was born. It had made a lasting impression on its maiden season but that ‘little something’, which fiery England’s Liverpool Manager, Jurgen Klopp at the Kop, calls the ‘salt in the soup’, was lacking. It is that ‘little something’ that over the years has made the SwaziBank Cup, in particular, special and unique. The unpredictability, the shocks, the upsets, the glut of goals and scintillating football is what makes knockout football different from a mundane league clash from English’s FA Cup, to South Africa’s Nedbank Cup.

Thank God, on the last 16 stage of the tournament this time around, with E1.2 million for the winner, we have been blessed with more upsets and shocks. There has been a re-live of the romantic biblical storyline of brave David’s slaying the lardy Goliath.
The bigger they come, the harder they fall – and the Ingwenyama Cup just loves them!

History and big support doesn’t win games. It doesn’t certainly win titles. Faltering hub giants, Manzini Wanderers have seemingly forgotten this, ushering in an era in which their dreary play, crisis-by-management style, means their long suffering fans would have to wait more years for the club to end the 11-year wait for anything shiny in the form of silverware. The last time Wanderers won a trophy, second choice goalkeeper Gugulethu Dlamini was probably learning how to walk!

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