GOLDEN ARROWS’ SIYANDA ZWANE (PART 4)

Mangethe, as the letter by Soccer Laduma reader, Lehlohonolo “Pane” Melato in this week’s Make Your Point attests, people have demanded more of your hilarious stories and we had to listen. So it’s truly by popular demand that you are back! Ha, ha, ha, sure, my brother, I’ve heard about the positive feedback from the readers and I have more stories for you. Let me tell you about coach Muhsin Ertugral when he joined Lamontville Golden Arrows. He arrived towards the end of the year and therefore he had to work with whoever was in the team, as he couldn’t make any new signings as the next transfer window was only in January. In his first week, he made us play a training match so that he could assess his team. He decided to sit up in the stands so that he could have a better view of the team. Eish, I don’t want to lie, we were playing really bad – we were terrible, to be precise! About 20 minutes into the game, tjoo, the way he walked down the grandstand to the field, ha, ha, ha... he was screaming and shouting, with our then team manager, James Dlamini, sitting in the VIP section, as he walked down and said, “James! James! Look at all these donkeys you bought for me. You guys said I must come and coach here and that you have players. I didn’t realise you had donkeys as players here!” Ha, ha, ha, eish, he was so angry and he walked straight into the pitch, while the game was on, and stood on the centre circle, letting us know exactly what he thought. That was so hilarious, man, and coach Muhsin will always be like that. Ha, ha, ha, true. The current Cape Town City captain, Thamsanqa Mkhize, was playing as a midfielder at Arrows and enjoyed using his skill. He was really good at it, but coach Muhsin wasn’t for that. One time, he stopped training and confronted Thami about his dribbling. “You know what? The next time you do that nonsense, I promise you, I will go inside the field and kick you. If you think Jackie Chan can kick, you will know when I kick you that he doesn’t know how to kick a person,” ha, ha, ha, coach Muhsin man.man Just recently, recently at Ajax Cape Town, we were playing a training match and I think it was Tashreeq Morris who missed the simplest of chances where all he needed to do was just make contact with the ball and it would be in the back of the net. Alas, he completely missed the ball and coach Muhsin went mental! “Stop! Stop! Stop! Let me tell you something, if I were to bring my grandma now, on a wheelchair, from Turkey, she would have scored that goal,” he said. Tashreeq was trying to explain and justify his miss, to which the coach responded, “I don’t blame you, I blame the people who brought you to this earth.” Ha, ha, ha, we just couldn’t stop laughing. Ha, ha, ha. Let me go back to my friend, Ganda-Ganda (Thamsanqa Gabuza). Ha, ha, ha, eish, there’s always so much to tell about this one. Back in the day, we were once flatmates when we were still teammates here at Arrows. He went out, one night, after 22h00 with R3 000 in his pocket, but came back with about R3 in the morning. I was laughing at him in the morning trying to find out how that could happen when he got home just after 5am. While we were still talking about that, I went to take a quick shower. A few minutes later, there’s a loud knock at the door. “Open the door, it is the police!” someone shouted, with Gabuza the only one available to open the door. He knew what he had done at the club, something I obviously can’t reveal here unfortunately and I hope the readers will understand, ha, ha, ha. He opened the door and I could hear the cops saying they were looking for Thamsanqa Gabuza, not knowing they were actually speaking to Gabuza himhim self. He calmly asked, “What has he done?” and they gave him the whole story, the same story he knew very well. He then told them, “Okay, Thamsanqa is taking a shower and you can have a seat and wait for him.” The police could obviously hear that someone was taking a shower, while Gabuza went to his room, and I could hear everything going on. Ha, ha, ha, this sounds interesting... what happened next? To my surprise, hardly a minute later, Gabuza tells the cops he has to rush to work but ‘Thamsanqa’ should be done any minute from now. He left. I eventually get out of the bathroom, relaxed and not even worried about all that I had overheard. The cops confront me, “Thamsanqa, you’re under arrest…” I told them, “I’m not Thamsanqa, my name is Siyanda Zwane and I can prove it.” They looked so shocked and told me my flatmate had told them that I was the man they were looking for. I told them, “The guy you were talking to is the man you’re looking for, Thamsanqa Gabuza, not me.” My brother, the cops were so furious for being played like that and that they couldn’t catch on at all. They rushed down the stairs in search of my flatmate but, obviously, he had long disappeared and was nowhere to be seen, ha, ha, ha. I can write a book about the time I spent with Gabuza, man. There’s just never a dull moment in his presence. Ha, ha, ha, unbelievable stuff! There was a time when he was scoring goals regularly for Arrows and he told me he had bought himself a ‘lucky charm’ that’s helping him score goals. I believed the whole ‘lucky charm’ story. One day I woke up from an afternoon nap and went to the bathroom. I could hear him talking, but I didn’t know he was using his ‘lucky charm’. He’s busy talking about his desire to continue scoring more goals and all that. I opened the door, without knocking, and saw him in the bath and looking all serious. I realised that I had interrupted something, so I apologised and before I could close the door, he was like, “Niyambona ke uyazingenela la (You see, he walks in here) without knocking. Please deal with him, let his leg break today.” I was like, “No, no, my bro, please tell your people I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” Ha, ha, ha, I was so scared because he looked so serious. “Ok, leave him, he’s apologised. Please don’t hurt him,” he said. I quickly closed the door and went back to my room. Eventually, he got out of the bathroom and I asked him what was going on. He told me, “If you ever enter without knocking again, I will tell my small boys to harm you.” I laughed so much because my man was seriously taking it too far, ha, ha, ha. There’s only one Ganda-Ganda, man. He’s still my boy to this day. Ha, ha, ha, we hope you don’t get into trouble with him for these crazy stories. Better yet, we have to give him a chance to tell us ‘his side’ of the story. Ha, ha, ha, he knows these are all real stories. By Vuyani Joni