Our current crop of strikers couldn’t score in a brothel
SOMEWHERE in South Africa there is a car threatening to become a skorokoro without ever hitting the road.
I’ve christened the car in question Virgin since she’s never been driven.
She’s curvaceous, boasting plump proportions in the right places, complete with a booty that will leave Boity black with envy.
What a pity that she hasn’t been touched, given that an army of hot-blooded men with raging libidos would have stampeded to be first to score. Ah, score, remember that word.
Before you accuse me of being a mecophile (urban dictionary describes this as a man or woman who loves their vehicle to such excess that they must make sweet whoopee to their vehicle), I’m not. Sure, I like my rickety jalopy but I love women more.
Virgin was promised to a PSL striker who would score 25 or more goals.
It is good that Virgin has preserved herself for the right guy. It seems she will wait in vain as her potential knights in shining armour appear to possess a perpetual propensity for not scoring.
It seems she will wait in vain for her potential knights in shining armour
The leading scorer in the Premier Soccer League has a paltry 10. No, that’s not a typo.
We are a few matches away from the finish line and the top marksman, Bernard Parker, is on 10 goals. Parker is behaving like an Amcu striker. He last scored a goal when Amcu workers were still working.
By contrast, Luis Suarez has scored 11 goals against one team in five games.
Those goals Suarez fired for Liverpool in 444 minutes of football against Norwich City included two hat-tricks, that half-a-dozen hammered at the Carrow Road home of the Canaries.
Suarez scored a further awesome foursome when the Reds crushed the Canaries at Anfield. It earned him the distinction of becoming the only Liverpool player to crack a triple hat-trick against one side.
Suarez’s tally in the Barclays Premier League is 30 goals, two away from beating the record of 31 jointly held by Alan Shearer and Cristiano Ronaldo.
How many players have scored a hat-trick, let alone two, not to mention three, in the PSL this season?
The dire situation of our strikers makes a mockery of the much-vaunted notion of ours being one of the top 10 leagues in the world.
Sure, the financial side is in fine fettle, with the PSL swimming in a pool of cash that is bigger than the GDP of Swaziland.
It is great that that side of the business is healthy. But the real business of football business is the business that happens between the four white lines of the field.
It is the standard of football and, frankly, the performances have not been proportionate to the PSL’s bank balance.
We should celebrate the sound financial stability and fiscal prudence. But it is high time that some of the money is reinvested in establishing junior leagues. It is at those lower levels where young players will learn the art of controlling, passing and striking, with a view to scoring as opposed to wayward, off-target shooting.
Once upon a time Collins Mbesuma was a big bad wolf who scored 35 goals in a season. Nowadays no striker is having a ton of fun by tearing the net regularly.
Siyabonga Nomvethe did well with 20 goals in 2012.
In 2014 Parker is on 10, Gabadinho Mhango, Thanduyise Khuboni, Robert Ng’ambi, Knowledge Musona, Sibusiso Vilakazi and Edward Manqele are all on eight.
If prolific strikers like Benni McCarthy could not go near 25 goals, the current crop leaves me hopeless. But then again, Benni was pushing a Porsche and could do without Virgin.