Still In Touch With...

THAMSANQA TIBE

Some bonds formed through football are unbreakable. After we had his former Dynamos teammate and bosom buddy Vusi Dhlamini on this page for the last four weeks, Thamsanqa Tibe just could not resist the temptation to ‘hit back’ and share crazy stories of his own about the ex-winger. “Gusheshe”, as Tibe is affectionately known, and who is these days a coach, having recently been at Venda Football Academy FC in the ABC Motsepe League, says, “I played with him from 2008 to 2012. Lovely bloke, but could be a handful at times.”

Hola, “Gusheshe”! Before we go any further, we gotta ask you this. In Part 1 of his “Still In Touch With…”, Vusi Dhlamini had some interesting stuff to say about you. He said your message to the coach about why you’d missed training was ‘lost in translation’, and that you once overdosed on pills due to your ‘limited understanding’ of English. Ha, ha, ha! Hayi maan. Uyayibona lento ayikhulumayo, yona ngiyishilo, iyiqiniso (No man. You see, what he said, I did say it, it’s true). But I first told him… I think our coach was Johnny Ferreira at the time and we were preparing to go to training. So, I said to Vusi, “I’m going to tell Johnny that umntanami udl’ umhlaba (my child ate soil), but I’m going to tell him in English.” Then Vusi said, “How are you going to put it to him in English?” I said, “I’m going to say my child is sick, she eat the world!” Ha, ha, ha, needless to say, he had a good laugh at me about it. He asked, “Are you really going to put it like that?” I said, “Yes, I’m going to say it like that, don’t worry.” Indeed, when the coach asked me at training why I had been absent the previous day, I told him just that… and everyone burst into laughter. It was all a joke from my side, and all of a sudden, Vusi turned it into a story that English and I were not the best of friends. As for the story about the pills, he, he, he… eish, that one yi vaar (is true). In the bus on the way to training, I found myself sweating like nobody’s business. I was wet, wet, wet, and then Vusi asked me, “Sbali, manje kwenze njani (what’s happening)?” I told him that I had just taken the pills I had been given by the doctor, three of them in one go. He looked at me and was like, “Huh? Are you being suicidal?” I said, “You see, the problem is that you don’t know English. It says there that I must take three.” Ha, ha, ha, we went and checked, only to find that I was supposed to take one, three times a day. After that, I was the butt of jokes in the team.

All good fun. Tell us more about Dhlamini… Ah, he was a good guy, but the only problem is that he liked to go AWOL. There was one time he went AWOL, together with Gerald Modabi, for all of Monday, Tuesday and the better part of Wednesday. Whenever his girlfriend couldn’t get him on the phone, she used to phone me, since the two of us were quite close.

“Two of us” meaning you and his girlfriend, right? Ha, ha, ha, no, sbali! On that occasion, I was in Polokwane and it turned out he was not in Polokwane. To make matters worse, I did not even have an idea where on earth he could be, as his phone was off. The girlfriend kept calling me and asking, “Gusheshe, where is Vusi?” It was a tricky situation and I even had to lie to her, saying I was not home, so had not seen him and that my calls to him were not going through. The guy came back to training on Wednesday afternoon, together with Modabi. That’s just how he was.

Since we were inseparabl eand did everything together, there was this one time the thought of buying ourselves a car crossed our minds. He just, out of the blue, said to me, “Hayi maan sbali, asithenge imoto. Le ndaba yokuthi singabina moto iyasishaya (let’s buy a car. This thing of not having a car is putting us at a disadvantage).” I asked him, “So how do we go about doing that?” He replied, “No, we’ll go to the bank and ask for a loan of maybe R15 000. We’ll pay it off, man, between the two of us. We’ll each pay R1 500 a month.” I gave this some thought, and became slightly uncomfortable with this arrangement because remember, this is the king of ‘Absent Without Official Leave’ we’re talking about here. On the one side, he’ll be receiving fines for not pitching up for training, and on the other, he’ll have this debt to deal with.

Eish, you must have had a headache just from thinking about it. But I eventually agreed, and off we went. The two of us used to bank with Absa, so that’s where our journey started. He went in first at this one branch, and they rejected him… ha, ha. I then went in, and they told me there was an amount of R800 from a previous debt that I needed to pay off in order to qualify. I went back to Vusi and told him about this little hurdle, but the problem was that we didn’t even have R800 next to our collective names – the perks of playing for Dynamos at the time! We then went to Capitec and, when we got there, this one lady told us we could get a loan there, but only for R6 000. We were like, “R6 000! No, man.” We decided to just leave the whole car purchase idea. So, two or three days after that, the two of us had to go to Jozi from Polokwane. Now, whenever we went to Jozi, we preferred hitchhiking because that way, we got there in no time. Luckily, we got a lift from a guy who was travelling all alone. I occupied the front seat, with Vusi in the backseat. I then fell asleep along the way, and when I awoke a little later, Vusi was behind the wheel! I got the shock of my life, ha, ha, ha. I asked him what was happening and he was busy saying, “Sbali, thula (shut up).” I’m like, “Ngithule kanjani, mf’ethu (How do I keep quiet, brother)? Where’s this guy who was driving?” He says, “Thula maan, thula. Asambe (Just keep your lips zipped. Let’s go).” The first thing that came to my mind was that Vusi had ‘hijacked’ the poor guy and threw him out of the car. Just as I was trying to make sense of everything, I looked behind me, and there was our Good Samaritan, fast asleep. Vusi told me, “No, sbali, this guy said I must drive as he was tired.” From that point, there was no drama, until we reached our destination.

Seems you always had trust issues when it came to Vusi. We’re glad to hear your worst fears weren’t realised. Catch you again next week! Sure, sbali.