In Touch With... ORLANDO PIRATES’ THABO MATLABA

“He will fight with me, thinking I’m the baboon.”

Festival, long time! Good to have you featuring in our ‘In Touch With…’ page. What have you got for us?

Hola, my bro, thanks for the opportunity. Ha, ha, ha, I have a couple of stories for you, but I would like to start with (Mpho) Makola, ha, ha, ha. He’s my roommate in camp but I’m not sure if he’s got a regular roommate now that I’ve not been in camp and playing for a while. He’s got a problem of bad dreams and there’s lento yale mfene (this thing of a baboon) that is troubling him in his sleep, ha, ha, ha. It is a seriously funny story, I can tell you that much. I would hear him screaming and talking in his sleep as he’s apparently in a fight with this baboon. Sometimes I just watch him without saying a word for a few minutes and then I wake him up, ha, ha, ha. From what I can tell, it is always a really tough fight and when I think the baboon is overpowering and almost killing him, I then wake him up, ha, ha, ha. When I do that (wake him up), akumelanga ukuthi ngime la eduze naye (I can’t stand close to him) because he will fight with me, thinking I’m the baboon he saw in his dreams. Ha, ha, ha, I have to make sure there’s enough distance between us so that he can regain his consciousness in time before he takes his fight with the baboon out on me.

Ha, ha, ha.

He will wake up sweating and breathing heavily and tell me, “Hey, it is that dream again!” i !” and d hhe would ld bbe almost l t out t of f breath. I told him, one time, that I decided to allow the fight to continue without any disturbance for a while before waking him up and he couldn’t believe it. He was very angry and swore at me for not waking him up when the fight had just started, ha, ha, ha.

But how can you not wake him up the moment you hear he’s in trouble?

Ha, ha, ha, I want a fair fight and I know that this dream is troubling him, but I want to only help him when he’s almost losing the fight, ha, ha, ha. I can tell how he’s doing in the fight because he screams and shouts all the time, ha, ha, ha – that’s my boy! Whenever he’s going to camp, and I’m not, I call and wish him well for the fight, ha, ha, ha, but before I put the phone down, I ask who is he sharing with so that I can warn that guy of the busy night he’s going to have, playing a referee, ha, ha, ha. The thing is, he doesn’t want me to tell people about his fights with the baboon and I gave him my word to never tell anyone but, eish, here I am today,td hha, hha, hha.

Bibo is going to kill you for telling on him.

Ha, ha, ha, that’s my boy and I think he’s sharing with (Thamsanqa) Gabuza sometimes. It must be a problem for him when Gabuza isn’t in the team. With GandaGanda, Bibo’s secret is safe for sure, ha, ha, ha. Eish, my boy is going to kill me for this, damn! Since we’ve not been in camp together for a long time, I really hope he finally killed that baboon because it was really frustrating and causing him sleepless nights. In fact, I will make sure to ask him about it next time I see him at training because that baboon has to die; it can’t trouble my boy so much, man, ha, ha, ha.

Ha, ha, ha, let’s give Bibo a break now. What else have you got?

I was in camp with the other Bibo (Thandani Ntshumayelo) in Polokwane the one time and there was a balcony outside our room. So I opened the curtain and BibBibo was still till iin bbed,d covered d iin a white sheet. There was a gardener who was busy cutting grass or something outside and he saw me. The guy came to have a chat with me and he saw Bibo behind me, as I was standing in the balcony. He was surprised that there was someone in my bed on the morning of the game. You know how Bibo’s body is built, ha, ha, ha, so it was easy for the guy to draw a conclusion that I had a lady sleeping over the night before. He asked me, “Aowa Festival, what’s going on? Pirates is playing today and you are sleeping with a girlfriend in your room?” I was like, “No, no, no this isn’t a lady.” Ha, ha, ha, turns out Bibo was listening to our conversation and he was clearly not impressed that this guy thought he was a lady. My boy got out of bed and confronted the gardener and he had to apologise and explained himself, ha, ha, ha.

Ha, ha, ha, now that you’ve brought this up, there was a picture of the two of youtoo comfortable in bed, doing the rounds on social media, once upon a time.

Ha, ha, ha, let me tell you exactly what was going on in that picture. People are crazy, man, and they really took things too far with that picture. What happened is that, I never had a problem sharing a bed with Bibo because we were always put together. You know, sometimes when you’re sharing a hotel room, there will be a big and a small bed. That’s where the problem started for us because neither one of us wanted to sleep on the small bed, so we’d argue about who should sleep on the small bed and never reach an agreement because we both wanted to sleep on the double-bed. That’s when we compromised and agreed to rather share the big bed, ha, ha, ha.

Ha, ha, ha, on that note, let’s leave it there for now, Festival. Let’s do this again next week.

No stress, my brother.

“He was clearly not impressed.”