sport – Bulletproof Truth

Never alone: the corona culture of sport and fandom

If a wicket falls in an empty stadium and no-one hears it, has it really fallen? The virus vexed future of playing and watching sport.

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

“WHEN you walk through a storm.” Even the most casual football person knows what’s coming. “Hold your head up high.” If, somehow, they don’t know, the internet will tell them. “And don’t be afraid of the dark.”

There aren’t quite enough recorded versions … “At the end of a storm …” to assign one to each of the 54 074 seats at Anfield. “ … There’s a golden sky …” But many have been made since 1945 … “And the sweet silver song of a lark …” when it featured in Carousel, a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

“Walk on through the wind …” These lines have been ringing out wherever Scousers, actual and aspirant, have gathered since Gerry and the Pacemakers went to No. 1 in the UK charts in 1963. “Walk on through the rain …” At this point even non-Liverpool supporters pause to pay their respects, because this isn’t any anthem.

“Though your dreams be tossed and blown …” It’s the sound of loyalty and belonging … “Walk on, walk on …” and of knowing you are among comrades … “With hope in your heart …” This, surely, is the sound of love.

“And you’ll never walk alone … You’ll never walk alone.”

But, late on the night of July 22, Liverpool’s players and staff were indeed alone. With each other. They had gathered on a specially constructed podium in the stands of their famous stadium’s even more famous Kop end, which was draped in banners and flags.

The dazzling football both teams had played that evening, unhinged in the best way from having to take things seriously, in Liverpool’s 5-3 win over Chelsea was irrelevant. Nothing had mattered in the English Premier League since June 25, when Chelsea beat Manchester City to ensure Liverpool would win the title for the first time in 30 years.

As Jordan Henderson, Liverpool’s captain, thrust the trophy into the night sky, his players boomed their triumph behind him and lights, fireworks, music and glittery confetti filled millions of screens around the world. But there was a hollowness at the heart of the scene that could only have been filled by occupants of those 54 074 empty, silent seats. The only witnesses, bar the functionaries, were Anfield’s ghosts of successes and failures past.

You’ll Never Walk Alone had, of course, swooned around the void before kick-off. Lacking human embrace, the music bounced back the unhearing hardness, cold in its rejection. But the first touch of the ball was accompanied, on television, by a warm cheer for the champions.

Fact’s petticoat slipped from under fiction’s ballgown at the start of the second half, when the canned noise kicked in a heartbeat too late to spare viewers the rippling echoes of the players’ shouting and clapping their encouragement to each other. For a moment, sad reality was all there was to hear.

It’s the job of Adam Peri, a Sky Sports sound supervisor, to spare us that terrifying sound. National Public Radio sought him out and found him twiddling knobs for West Ham’s match against Watford in a studio kilometres from London Stadium. “Making sure the West Ham chants are nice and loud,” Peri said. A West Ham player went down. “I’m just going to trickle in a bit of whistles; giving it a bit of a boo …”

He sees his role as “trying to anticipate what a player might do next, and in a way I guess I’m reading their mind. When you really get into the zone you’re living and breathing the game, feeling confident enough to use any sound that is available to help tell the story.”

The sounds Peri edits into viewers’ consciousness have been recorded at earlier matches by Electronic Arts, or EA Sports (EA), the makers of the FIFA video game. EA sound designer Paul Boechler revealed some of the geekery at play: “There’s things like the ‘oooh’ reaction for a save, and the ‘ooooooh’ reaction to a miss.”

In football matches broadcast from Spain, a mosaic overlay was applied to camera shots that included the stands to break up views of endless rows of unfilled seats. Another difference will confirm the suspicions of those from sunnier climes that England’s unrelenting winter greyness seeps into hearts and minds. “The Premier League is doing negative reactions, but La Liga is actually not,” Boechler said. “La Liga is going with a much more positive reaction focus overall.”

La Liga head of communications Joris Evers confirmed as much, and added: “But it’s not the same. We want to try and get real fans back in the stands as soon as possible.”

And so says all of sport. If a wicket falls in an empty cricket ground and no-one hears it, has it really fallen? England and West Indies restarted cricket with three Tests played in Southampton and Manchester. Not a lot besides the low burble of a crowd, artificially added by Sky, could by heard.

Without spectators the sound of major sport is of one hand clapping. That may be no bad thing. Instead of Sky’s audio smoke and mirrors, we could hear managers chewing gum between barks at their players. In Germany, Bundesliga viewers had the option of tuning out the canned atmosphere so they could do exactly that.

But it’s complicated, as the television audience discovered during a baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros in Houston played on the same day Liverpool raised the trophy. When Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly lingered at first base after a confrontational play, Astros manager Dusty Baker, out of sight but not out of range of the microphones, was heard yelling, “Just get on the mound, motherfucker.”

Baseball has had an interesting relationship with empty stadiums. Alternative plans have had to be made for the millions of peanuts grown and roasted to be sold at games in the US, what with each team’s regular season schedule hacked from 162 to only 60 games. In Taiwan, cheerleaders smiled and danced at desolate stands. Down the road in South Korea, teams were in trouble after dressing up sex dolls and putting them in the stands. Bookmakers in the US have adjusted their odds to account for the assumption that, without spectators, home advantage isn’t nearly as influential.

Something similar happened in the Bundesliga, where teams achieved demonstrably better results than previously when they played away. And diving disappeared. What’s the point of trying to fool the referee by rolling like a freshly felled log for metres on end if thousands of one-eyed home fans aren’t howling in sympathy?

Will the seeming silence of the scrum, beyond the hit and heave, be shattered by the sounds of one pack of forwards trying to monster the other? Some of those noises come from strange places and are better unheard. It seems SuperSport, the primary broadcasters of the game in South Africa, will spare us the gorier details once rugby resumes. A spokesperson said the network was “still tweaking the tech, but as a matter of principle, we will incorporate virtual sounds, crowds and fan interaction”.

Even so, as long as stadiums stay empty except for players, officials and camera operators, a human-shaped vacuum will gape at the heart of sport. Professor Heather Reid is the philosophy chair at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. She sits on the boards of publications like the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport and Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. Less extraordinarily, she’s also a fan, as she explained to the BBC: “I was in the bird’s nest stadium in Beijing the night that Usain Bolt broke the world record in the 100 metres [at the 2008 Olympics], and there’s this feeling that goes over the crowd that makes everyone feel like hugging each other. We transcend our partisan rooting for particular countries and a particular athlete, and we all start cheering just for what a human being is able to do.”

Unfortunately for all who know and cherish that feeling, another professor, bioethicist Andy Miah, the science communication and future media chair at the University of Salford in Manchester, is here to burst that bubble. “The big transition that people are coming to terms with is the idea that we are able to live within virtual worlds,” he said. “It’s really remarkable what’s happened over the last few months.”

Miah listed the Mutua Madrid Virtual Open Pro tennis tournament, which featured Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal squaring off not across a net but in front of a computer, holding controllers instead of racquets, as an example. And the Australia Virtual F1 Grand Prix, which replaced the cancelled real-world version: suddenly gamers were competing with drivers.

“Reality is going through a major upheaval,” Miah said. “Sport has always been a kind of unreality. We’re beginning to see a complete change of the relationship between the spectator and the player. People want to be part of the production of the sport, not just be spectators of it.”

Already, Formula E drivers’ electric cars go faster when they use a “fanboost” — a surge of bonus power available to the five drivers who win the most supporters’ votes. “We can imagine a future where you have crowds making decisions in the field of play in a much more direct way,” Miah said.

The fans, it seems, are no longer content to watch alone.

First published by New Frame.

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Baklava, bridges and brutality: inside Erdoğan’s Turkey

The hand of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the closet islamist – some accuse him of practising neo-Ottomanism – trying to subvert Turkey’s decades of secularism is plain to all who want to see it.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

“ARE you a christian?” The question was trapped in the amber of the muslim call to prayer ringing out all around. It was asked by an old man as we stood across the street from the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate and in front of St George Church in the Fatih area of Istanbul upon a golden Sunday evening a few weeks ago.

I said I was free of faith. He looked bemused.

“Free of faith? Free of faith! Hmph! But without faith you cannot live.”

I did not argue the obvious: here I was, alive, well and happy. Probably, in significant part, because I was free of faith.

He didn’t pursue the issue, no doubt considering me a lost cause. Instead he unfurled priest’s vestments, all but disappeared into their billowing blackness as he donned them with a flourish, bade us farewell, and marched theatrically into the church to solemnise a wedding. Father Elvis, not his real name, had entered the building.

In a restaurant in thoroughly hipsterised Karaköy, a young woman sat among friends who had gathered to mark one of their birthdays. Only she wore hijab. But, like everyone else at the table, she smoked and swigged beer from the bottle.

Was she rebelling against her culture? Was she a subversive in disguise trying to undermine the faith that signals that culture? What would the Istanbullus who are adamant that the nation is divided strictly into those who drink alcohol and those who do not make of her? She had faith, it appeared. Would Father Elvis have approved?

Like baklava, Turkey has many layers. It is more probable than possible, in only a few of Istanbul’s teeming streets, to find cafés serving muddy Turkish coffee alongside those offering the jet fuel that is Antipodeans’ gift to espresso.

Or classy bars and restaurants showcasing some of the 61.5-million litres of wine the country producers annually — much of it of high quality, but only 5% of it exported — to a nation of more than 82-million, 99.8% of whom call themselves muslim.

Or nostalgic shrines to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — the modernising secularist who was galvanised by leading an army to victory over the Allies, commanded by Winston Churchill, at Gallipoli in 1916 into the founding father of modern Turkey in 1923 — within sight of staunchly sacrosanct places of worship.

Or luridly pink-mouthed, wigged, tight-topped transsexual sex workers leaning out of first-floor windows and trying, loudly, to fish customers from the streaming pavements leading to a market frequented by conservative Kurdish women, identifiable by their penchant for snowy, delicately tassled, almost gossamer hijab.

Or 3.6-million Syrians, having fled the war at home, transposing their lives — complete with cardamom-laced coffee, a type of dried spinach called molokhiya, and restaurants using the same names, offering the same menu, staffed by the same chefs and waiters, serving the same customers as they did in Damascus and Aleppo — onto a city that has shape-shifted through the ages from being called Lygos, Augusta Antonina, Byzantium, Stanbulin, Constantinople, Islambol, Polin, Bolis, al-Qustantiniyya, the New Rome, the New Jerusalem, to Throne of the Romans.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has mastered separating the layers of the baklava just far enough — while also keeping the whole in one piece — to stay in power.

Born, on February 26, 1954 in Kasımpaşa, an ancient section of Beyoğlu on Istanbul’s European side whose hills tumble into the Golden Horn, Erdoğan grew up selling lemonade and simit, a kind of crisp, sesame-seeded bagel that is the breakfast of choice for almost every Turk, in the streets — where he also played football.

Rather than a prolific scorer he was blessed with the foresight to create goals, and played professionally for Kasımpaşa. These days the club’s stadium, immaculately appointed but small with a capacity of only 14 000, bears his name.

That doesn’t fit with rest of the Erdoğan story, because what he does he does big. Bridges swoop and gleam, one, across the Golden Horn, comes replete with a metro stop, another is the third suspension bridge across the Bosphorus. A mosque in the grand imperial manner, big enough to hold 63 000, looms lumpily in the distance. A vast new international airport is slickly efficient and almost an enjoyable place to be. A tunnel has been burrowed under the Bosphorus, all the better to apply a laxative to Istanbul’s chronically car-clogged colon.

Erdoğan holds a Trumpian perspective laced with Putinesque overtones, which never fails to quicken the patriotic pulse, particularly of Turks outside the main centres. At the Bosphorus bridge’s opening in August 2016, he presented a Turkish proverb as his own profundity: “When a donkey dies it leaves behind its saddle. When a man dies he leaves behind his works. We will be remembered for this.”

But, as with Donald Trump, there is dodginess in the details. The running track that hugs the shore under the bridge over the Golden Horn looks like something out of user-friendly Brisbane. Alas, it peters out in less than a kilometre.

Similarly, kiosks flutter with all manner of newspapers, 45 of them national dailies, and another 15 exclusive to Istanbul. And few will say less than a glowing word about Erdoğan, not least because 231 journalists have been jailed in the wake of a failed coup on July 15, 2016.

The hand of Erdoğan the closet islamist — some accuse him of practising neo-Ottomanism — trying to subvert Turkey’s decades of secularism is plain to all who want to see it.

Mosques are built in spaces previously dominated by churches, and like all the others in the country they are funded by the regime, which pays everything from the salaries of clerics to the cleaning bills — and controls what is preached. Every Thursday evening the sermon for the next day’s juma service, the week’s most important and best attended prayer for muslims the world over, flutters into the inbox of every imam in Turkey. That’s not to say the men of the cloth don’t have a choice: either they relay the message as is, or follow the themes outlined, helpfully, in the same document.

Lessons on evolution and Atatürk and his successor, Ismet Inönü, have been removed from the school curriculum amid promises to teach “from the perspective of a national and moral education” to “protect national values” — code for a more conservative, religious approach.

And it’s working. Turkish flags displayed prominently in the streets, and there are many, have been put there either by overt nationalists or immigrants desperate to proclaim their affection for the country.

If you want to research why that has happened if you are in Turkey don’t bother with Wikipedia: since April 2017 the site has been banned there in the wake of articles that said the country was a state sponsor of terrorism.

“My motherland, my beautiful but bruised motherland, is not a democracy,” Turkish author Elif Shafak wrote in an article for Politico last year. For views like that she is routinely rubbished in Erdoğan’s press, and never given the right of reply.

Yet erudite, impassioned opposition to the president and his government’s policies is as easy to find in Istanbul’s streets as crisp baklava and muddy coffee.

People speak openly about their fear of where Turkey might be after Erdoğan, who has ruled since 2003, is no longer in office; when his powerful allies in the construction industry finally run out of money. But some of those same people decline to accept the fact of the genocide, perpetrated by the Ottomans, that claimed the lives of 1.5-million Armenians between 1914 and 1923. On that score they are one with Erdoğan’s regime, which protested petulantly in April when France and Portugal officially recognised this systematic mass murder for what it was.

The Kurds will know how the Armenians felt. Erdoğan has long labelled their organised structures as terrorist, and there is evidence that in their attempts to raise funds they operate more like the mafia than political groups. But Turkey’s army didn’t ask who was a member of what when they began driving the Kurds out of northern Syria on October 9 — which they were free to do after Trump withdrew a small force of strategically situated American troops. Erdoğan wanted a buffer 30 kilometres deep and 480 kilometres long on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, and by October 28 his troops had displaced an estimated 130 000 and left 400 000 without access to clean water. How many have been killed in the cause is unclear.

On October 29 the anti-Trump US congress decided, by 405 votes to 11, that the Armenians had indeed been victims of genocide. As a position of principle it came a century too late. As a backlash against their own president it was clear, and derided by the Turks.

“Circles believing that they will take revenge this way are mistaken,” foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu posted on social media. “This shameful decision of those exploiting history in politics is null and void for our government and people.”

The brutality and bloodletting has ceased, at least until Erdoğan makes good on his threat to chase the legions of Syrian refugees back from whence they came. But the damage has been done. It didn’t help the Kurds that most of them are, like Erdoğan, Sunni muslims. Not that they would have been spared had they been something else.

Because Erdoğan is, at his core, once all his artifice is stripped away and his ambition exposed, that thoroughly human thing: free of faith.

First published by New Frame.

From Maradona, maybe, to Jagger, definitely, to Mugabe, unfortunately

Some writers on sport can no longer take in a game without also taking notes. Others have forgotten the simple joy of being part of a crowd.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

IS that Maradona? There! Leaning out of that balcony and thrashing his arms at the players down on the field like a crazy crackerjack. Is it him? Could be. But it’s difficult to be sure here in the cheap seats behind the goal.

Which is where I was a few years ago, at La Bombonera watching Boca Juniors play Independiente. It was hard to know whether you were less safe inside the stadium or immediately outside it, in some of Buenos Aires’ meanest streets.

To be there was impressive enough. To survive the experience was a triumph. I celebrated the fact the next afternoon by going across town to watch a quarter-final in the Argentinian polo championship, where the only clear and present danger was in failing to recognise the designer draped celebrities in the stands. At least, they behaved like celebrities. I can confirm that Maradona was not in attendance.

To go, inside a few hours, from average beer and a burger of uncertain provenance to chilled champagne and classy canapés was only part of the story of the journey. Unlike at the football, at the polo there were no flags, no flares, and no chanting, bristling, duelling sections of the crowd.

At the old Yankee Stadium in New York — they’ve since built a new one next door — I watched Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera from high above the third base foul line. To know that Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe diMaggio played on the same field still gives me goosebumps.

The queue to get into Wimbledon; ah, I know it well. It takes so long that once you’re finally in you don’t care who is playing on the courts available to plebs like you. Any pair, or quartet, of racqueteers will do.

I’ve seen bullfighting in Seville — where exponentially more sunflower seeds were chewed by spectators and their husks spat onto the floor than bulls were brutally if artfully killed — ocean yacht racing in Auckland, and hurling played by a bunch of homesick Irish in a park in London.

And that’s all apart from my improper job of writing about, and sometimes talking about, sport.

The closest I’ve come to blurring the line is when I found myself aboard an ocean racing yacht outside Cape Town harbour, trying to work out which way was up while also hanging onto my already eaten lunch and taking enough mental notes to be able to put together a half-decent feature.

That and facing Ottis Gibson, then Border’s big fast bowler, in the nets at Buffalo Park to write what my editor called a “participation piece”. I’m not sure how many times my helpless swishing at deliveries Gibson bowled at significantly less than his full pace could be termed participating.

Watching sport and reporting it are starkly different. Some of us can no longer take in a game for the hell of it without also taking notes. Others, grown far too used to the free food, free drink, free wifi and free desk space in ever more comfortable pressboxes, have forgotten the simple joy of sitting in the stands and being part of a crowd.

For several years until a year or so ago, reporters covering Test cricket in England would have the services of a masseuse. Yes, in the pressbox. All jokes about happy endings have fallen foul of the sub-editors.

Civilians of a sport-loving inclination tend to ask us two questions: “Do you have any spare tickets?” and “Can I hide in your luggage?”. We do not have tickets: our access is strictly by accreditation. We never see a ticket. And, no, you can’t hide in my luggage: I need all the space and weight allowance I have for hats, running gear and spare notebooks and pencils.

And the presence of a masseuse isn’t the joke it might seem. At games at this year’s men’s World Cup, some of us would live blog the match, a job that stretches into many thousands of hurriedly thought and typed words on its own, write two match reports — one for print, the other for digital, both to be filed the instant the last ball was bowled — attend the press conferences and the mixed zones, write up quotes pieces from the press conferences and mixed zones, and whip up a fresh quotes piece for the morning’s online offering.

That done, we would sink back into a metaphoric leather chair with an even more metaphoric whisky to hand, to essay an entirely metaphoric piece to be published by the future of serious cricket writing itself.

By which I mean one of the slew of Indian websites for whom, essentially, you explode a mustard seed of an idea into a fully fledged faith of how that aspect of the game should be played. And adored, of course.

That all added up to days that started at around 9am with the trip to ground — the toss was at 10am — and ended just in time to sink a pint or three before the pubs closed at 11pm. We could have used a massage after all that, even if only to ensure the elbows of our drinking arms hadn’t seized in typing mode.

But there are perks. Once, while covering a Test at the Bourda in Georgetown, I saw Mick Jagger looming whitely out of the deep verandah of the stand opposite. I still have an unpaid phone bill in Barbados, circa 1992, and I was thrown out of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

So, was that Maradona at La Bombonera. Dunno. But I hope it was.

What do sponsors want, and does sport know the answer?

Winning is no longer good enough to keep sponsors. Bumping up spectator attendance, ensuring social media strategies are better than opponents’, and keeping products in fans’ faces matters, too.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

IF a Cricket South Africa (CSA) press release has any news value, which often is not the case, it tends to lurk in the last paragraph. And sometimes what’s been omitted is the only important stuff.

Like it was on August 29, when the 2018-19 franchise fixtures were announced. Nowhere in the accompanying release did CSA bother to point out that two of last season’s three title sponsors were no longer on board.

Happily that could be ascertained by reading the titles of the attached files: where once were Sunfoil, Momentum and Ram, only Momentum remained.

The withdrawal of the other two was duly confirmed. A better question might have been whether are still interested for cricket and business reasons, or only because of contractual commitments. Good luck getting a straight answer from anyone involved.

Meanwhile, cricket’s franchises have held their nose and leapt into bed with companies like World Sports Betting and Hollywood Bets, whose names should sound the alarm with the matchfixing police.

Last week cricketminded South Africans were informed that, “The Barons VW Cape Town logo will be displayed on the non-leading arm of the playing jerseys during the limited overs competitions as well as on the training jersey” of the “World Sports Betting Cape Cobras”.

And that, “The Mitchum logo will be displayed on the collars of the Cobras’ jerseys during the entire domestic campaign as well as on the training jerseys”. The “World Sports Betting” bit was left out in that reference, perhaps because no amount of deodorant can stop gambling from stinking.

Times are indeed desperate if PR people think such fluff is going to attract anything but derisory coverage.

Not that CSA’s much hyped T20 league can hope for even that. Weeks away from its proposed launch it has named neither sponsors nor a broadcaster, nor even a name. The Titanic20 seems apt.

Things could, however, get worse.

“Sport sponsorship continues to evolve,” Michael Goldman, a South African who is an associate professor in sport management at San Francisco University, told Times Select.

“Part of the shift away from mere media exposure and brand awareness through sponsorship, towards requiring brand preference outcomes, and ultimately real revenue results, means that companies are looking more closely at the effectiveness and efficiency of their sponsorship spend.

“We have seen this shift most publicly with AB-Inbev in the US, and I know South African sponsors are equally focused on increasing the real financial returns from every Rand invested in sport sponsorship.”

AB-Inbev has nothing to do with a freshly retired De Villiers who can bat a bit. It’s shorthand for Anheuser-Busch InBev, the owners of some of the most undrinkable yet widely drunk beer yet brewed. And one of the heaviest hitters in sport sponsorship. Yes, all that Castor Oil Lager and Badweiser adds up to something palatable in the shape of financial support for some of the biggest properties in any game. But for how much longer?

According to Joao Chuieri, AB-Inbev’s “vice-president of consumer connections”, which is apparently a proper job, “The traditional sponsorship model, based on fees and media commitments, does not deliver the best value for us at a time when most leagues and teams are facing challenges with live attendance and TV ratings.”

Umm, is that a ruck or a maul, ref? Neither. It’s a sponsor telling sport the goalposts have moved so far they aren’t on the field.

Winning, it seems, is no longer good enough on its own for a team or a competition to keep AB-Inbev as a sponsor. They will also need to work on bumping up spectator attendance, ensuring their social media strategies are better than their opponents’, and keeping AB-Inbev’s products front and centre in fans’ faces. If teams and leagues jump through those hoops they could earn a bonus of up to 30%.

You can hear the coaches already: “I don’t bloody care what kind of dumb shot you play! Just make sure you get the bloody logo on TV for longer than the other team’s batsmen do when they play the same dumb shots! I want those bonus dollars like I used to want those bonus points!”

Not that franchises and the suits are doing themselves many favours.

“This shift is taking place as teams and sport bodies continue to raise the price of sponsorship packages in a relatively small market, currently experiencing another economic downturn,” Goldman said. “These tougher questions may be contributing to the issues that CSA is facing.”

Ah, CSA, where the next credibility crumble is only a buried paragraph or an omission away from hitting the more critically inclined headlines.

But there is something innocent and amateurish about sport organisations’ bungling and their attempts to hide it. At least in comparison to what goes on in other sectors.

“Sport sponsorship is not alone in facing stronger calls for ethical measurement and transparent returns,” Goldman said.

“Keith Weed, the chief marketing officer of Unilever, was the latest industry leader to shine a very bright light on the sometimes unethical and perhaps fraudulent metrics involved in influencer marketing.

“The prevalence of fake followers, automated bots facilitating fake engagement, and the realisation that some so-called influencers probably have no actual influence on customer behavior, has called into question the very high fees being paid to individuals on social media.”

Weed took his shot across the bows of this ship of fools and fiends when he said, “The key to improving the situation is three-fold: cleaning up the influencer ecosystem by removing misleading engagement; making brands and influencers more aware of the use of dishonest practices; and improving transparency from social platforms to help brands measure impact. We need to take urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever.”

Not only does sport no longer give sponsors what it thinks they want, it no longer understands what sponsors want. Does anyone except the sponsors themselves? Now there’s a last paragraph to ponder.

Why Cinderella sports don’t get to play ball in SA’s big leagues

People in countries where you might be jailed or murdered for saying the wrong thing are far better at playing volleyball than they are in Cyril’s sunny South Africa.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

VOLLEYBALL is fun. Many of us would have played it at school, some to higher levels than others. No, that’s not a short joke.

Dig. Set. Spike. Block. If you’ve seen any of those actions performed you don’t need an explanation: a key part of what makes volleyball fun is that it is so accessible to so many of many different abilities.

If you can get your hands to where the ball before it hits the floor, you can play volleyball. To some degree, anyway.

Watching volleyball is also fun. It’s a fast, exciting game combining skill, temperament and athleticism. Things get tense out there on the court, and often there’s the drama of ill-tempered exchanges between opponents and teammates to savour along with the action.

Sounds like something we, as South Africans, who like to tell ourselves that we are a “sports mad nation”, whatever that means, should be good at.

We aren’t. We suck at volleyball.

South Africa’s men’s team are ranked joint 137th — or last — by the Federation Internationale de Volleyball, along with backward wastelands of international sport like the Faroe Islands, Lithuania, Macau, Georgia and the Netherlands Antilles.

Places where you might be more concerned about staying out of jail for saying the wrong thing in public or being murdered by the state or someone else with a point to prove — Iran, Egypt, Cuba, Venezuela, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine — are far better at playing volleyball than we are here in Cyril’s sunny South Africa, where despite our society’s criminal levels of inequality we can still laugh out loud at jokes like Julius and Helen and that Zwelithini idiot without getting into trouble.

Mzansi’s women’s side are, like Liechtenstein Malta, San Marino, Andorra and Wales, among others, 115th — also last on the list.

And matters aren’t going to improve anytime soon. The national under-21 and under-19 men’s sides and the women’s under-20 and under-18 teams share the bottom rung of the ladder with all sorts of odds and sods from corners of the world that you would be forgiven for forgetting existed.

But that’s better than the under-23 rankings, which do not feature South Africa at all; neither men nor women. South Africa didn’t even send teams to last year’s world championships in the age group.

At the BRICS Games last month neither the men’s not the women’s team could take as much as a set off India or China or, in the case of the men, Russia. That’s right, fellow Saffers: your teams lost every match they played 3-0. Just to rub it in, every other men’s match went to 3-2.

And yet, even given this clearly parlous state of affairs, there is no outcry. Go to the news section of Volleyball South Africa’s (VSA) website and you will not be greeted by handwringing and despair and promises and plans to fix what’s obviously wrong. Instead, the top story is headlined, “VOLUNTEERS A DRIVING FORCE BEHIND HOSTING A SUCCESSFUL SPORTS EVENT IN SOUTH AFRICA.” Yes, in caps.

That’s noble and worthy of praise, VSA, but what the hell are you doing about sorting out the mess your game would seem to be in?

Here in the mainstream media, too, we are not bothered by the fact that South Africans play volleyball about as well as songololos avoid being stood on.

Volleyball players, officials and administrators are indeed worried. But because they have to relentlessly project positivity in a country where the limelight is never theirs, they daren’t sully whatever space they have for publicity — and with it, perchance, the wonder of sponsorship — with negativity.

This is not to pick on one sport. Or, more pointedly, on one Cinderella sport. For instance Syria, which since 2011 has been at war with itself in one the most miserably cynical conflicts of the long and, in this aspect, shameful history of the human race, are playing better football than Bafana Bafana. FIFA’s latest rankings show Syria have moved three places up to 73rd. South Africa? Two spots down to 74th.

But you won’t find too much in the way of handwringing and despair over how awful we are at playing football. That’s because some of us have resigned ourselves to the fact while others are more interested in the bubble of unreality that is Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates and the assorted lesser actors of that melodrama. Still others think we play good football here in Cyril’s sunny South Africa. Ag shame. Then again, some of us think colonialism wasn’t all bad.

This is not the case with rugby and cricket, where anything less than winning the World Cup — or even departing from the higher reaches of the rankings — is deemed failure for which explanations are demanded and given.

But Test cricket, for instance, involves only a dozen countries. FIFA’s rankings list 211 teams. The International Cricket Council pegs South Africa at No. 2 on the Test ladder. Equate that to the football landscape and South Africa would be in 35th place — not as bad as 74th but not nearly as good as No. 2.

Cinderella sports like volleyball are rarely held up to that kind of light. Why? Because they do not attract prominent sponsorship. Because all sections of the media report on them exponentially less than on football, rugby and cricket. Because South Africans haven’t swallowed the bad medicine — as they have from football, rugby and cricket — that what happens on the volleyball court somehow impacts on our broader society; the dangerous and unseemly nonsense that sport is a matter of patriotism. Because the only South Africans who care about sports like volleyball, baseball and underwater hockey are the people who play, officiate and administer them.

And that’s not the worst of it. Basketball has a professional league in South Africa but it remains insignificant. So you have to wonder whether the NBA is helping or hindering the game in this country by dominating what opportunities there are for media coverage and staging an annual “NBA Africa Game” that has nothing to do with South Africa except that it is played here.

Rather than basketball, wouldn’t you rather be volleyball? At least you don’t have a bunch of superstars playing in a media-saturated competition on the other side of the world stealing your oxygen.

The last thing Cinderella needed was a better-dressed sister.

Why television’s days as sport’s medium of choice are numbered

Television’s audience is finding there are more convenient, less prescriptive, cheaper ways to get what they want without having to put up with – and pay for – the stuff they don’t want.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

SPORT’S revolution will not be televised. Instead it will be streamed to any number of devices near you. One of them is probably in your pocket or in your hand. You could be reading this story on it.

Your television? It will go the way of the dear old landline telephone, these days a significant presence only in the workplace and probably only until current contracts with service providers run out.

People who make televisions and programming know this. That’s why modern sets are able to connect to the internet, and why programming that was never intended for television is bought up by their suits and broadcast on their channels.

These are desperate measures by a medium that knows it’s in the departure lounge of society, that it will be killed off by a better idea that is already upon us.

Television will not be able to save itself that way any more than carphones, once considered a great leap forward from landlines, were able to stave off their extinction by the still soaring popularity of that sleek object you’re holding in your hand.

Sport is at the centre of all that. The embarrassingly badly run SABC is past the point of redemption, it’s announcement on Monday that Bafana Bafana and Banyana Banyana games will disappear from its screens hardly a surprise after last week’s news — since rescinded — that it couldn’t even afford to put Premier Soccer League matches on radio. But would you subscribe to DStv if it wasn’t for SuperSport?

Even if you have a thing for the crappier movies out there, or can’t bear the thought of not being able to watch endless reruns of some hammy series, or have to put up with children who become ungovernable if they can’t watch cartoons, or you are a news junkie, your decision to keep paying MultiChoice R969 a month is likely to be tightly tethered to your interest in sport.

That’s not only true in here SuperSport country. In the United States last year 60 of the top 100 primetime live broadcasts among people aged 18 to 49 were sport events. The only exception in the top 10 was the Oscars.

So, why is television in trouble considering it gives its audience what they want? Because that audience is finding there are other, more convenient, less prescriptive, cheaper ways to get what they want without having to put up with — and pay for — all the stuff they don’t want. One of these years the idea of a “channel bouquet” will be like memories of the Rubik’s cube, that thing we all used to have when we also all had telephones that weren’t cellular.

Boxing, like it has been so often, is ahead of the game; all the other games. Floyd Mayweather junior asking fight fans for US$89.95 or, for HD, US$99.95 in pay-per-view fees to watch him take on Conor McGregor last August sounds like a new-fangled notion. But the original idea was hatched when Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott ducked through the ropes at Yankee Stadium in New York in June 1948 in the first sport event sold on closed-circuit television to paying patrons gathered in cinemas far and wide.

The Mayweather-McGregor fight was on Showtime, a cable television service, and could be ordered through several providers of what Americans call cable. For those who have seen life after television it was also available on a range of streaming services. But that doesn’t mean television is safe as long as it plays nice with the geeky newish kids on the block who prefer code to Coke, or even to coke.

Naspers, who own SuperSport, are trying to pass themselves off as hip and happening. In their 2018 annual report, under the heading “Who we are”, they describe themselves thus: “Founded in 1915, we are a global internet and entertainment group and one of the largest and most successful technology investors in the world.”

Snarkier readers might wonder how Naspers were, in 1915, part of something that didn’t exist until 1990, when the internet was invented. Others might wonder why they aren’t keen to reveal up front that they remain, as they were originally, newspaper publishers and printers — Naspers is a contraction of Nasionale Pers, or National Press — before becoming television barons.

Because they and their ilk are trying to stay relevant in a world that increasingly sees them as money-sucking middlemen. Television is being squeezed from both ends of the broadcast equation: its consumers prefer to connect directly with the source of what they want to watch — the producers of sport, news and entertainment — and those sources are becoming more attuned to firming up those connections.

Formula 1 fans will this year be able to subscribe, for between US$8 and US$12 a month, to a service that will give them live coverage during races from in-car cameras. They’ll also get practice, qualifying, press conferences and pre and post-race interviews.

That sounds a lot like what you will see if you tune in to SuperSport during the F1 season. Except that the service is being sold by Formula 1 itself.

Who needs television when the means of broadcast production are within reach of anyone with a smartphone and a decent internet connection, much less F1’s resources for producing quality content?

It’s called an OTT — over the top — platform and it’s becoming the go-to option for many sports, albeit at this stage the smaller codes who struggle to attract fusty old broadcasters. Now all those barefoot waterskiing fans have somewhere to watch the stuff, and to hell with television.

But how long will it take for football, rugby, cricket, tennis, golf and athletics and the Americans and their sports — most of which already produce plenty of their own video content — to wise up to the fact that they don’t need to sell rights to make money if they can flog advertising and pay-per-view plans instead?

Only as long as broadcasters can afford to pay them enough to make it worth their while not to go it alone. The bubble has to burst, perhaps when subscribing to a service like DStv costs significantly more than, say, R1000 and sport’s consumers decide to put those funds into a fibre internet connection instead.

This is already happening in the United States, where ESPN are haemorrhaging subscribers from their cable television service while gaining many for their streaming services. That’s led, in other ESPN publications, to a scramble to catch the wave and to massive staff cuts. Those who remain at, for instance, websites that were built on quality longform writing now find themselves working for a video-driven publication.

Like all of us they will be keen to see how Cristiano Ronaldo gets on in his first game for Juventus, which will be against Chievo on August 18.

No longer have a television? No worries: the game will be streamed live on Facebook. For free …

Time to face the painful truth: sport is bad for you

We think sport stars have the best bodies. But they are rarely free of pain and they age faster because they wear out exponentially more quickly.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Florence

HOW many 20-year-olds do you know who have to put their lives on hold for six weeks because of a knee injury? Or 23-year-olds who live for months with a spinal stress problem? Or 25-year-olds who have a shoulder wrenched out of shape?

The subjects of these calamities are not soldiers, bar brawlers or victims of domestic abuse. They are instead Damian Willemse, Kagiso Rabada and Mohamed Salah — stars of rugby, cricket and football, and apparently fine physical specimens of the human race.

Except that they’re not. They’re crocked. And they are far from the only people impaired, often permanently, by what they do for a living.

We think sport stars have the best bodies out there. Closer to the truth is that they are rarely free of pain, and that they age faster than we do because they wear themselves out exponentially more quickly.

Dale Steyn’s painful relationship with his right shoulder and left heel for more than two years now proves what doesn’t need proving: sport is bad for you, particularly if you play at the top level.

Stories about injuries are the bane of a sportswriter’s life; right up there with reporting on positive drug tests and trying to make players sound interesting when they say utterly forgettable things, which for almost all of them is almost all of the time.

But they’re paid to play. Not talk. Thing is, it can seem as if they are paid to learn the Latin names of those parts of their bodies that have been wrecked in the cause of trying to win.

The exceptionally articulate Steyn is a case in point, what with words like infraspinatus and coracoid tripping off his tongue as readily as bouncer and yorker.

You probably know your yorkers from your bouncers, but did you know the infraspinatus is, according to the medical books, “a thick triangular muscle”, “one of the four muscles of the rotator cuff” and that its major function is to “externally rotate the humerus [the bone that connects shoulder to elbow] and stabilise the shoulder joint”?

Or that the coracoid is “a small hook-like structure on the lateral edge of the superior anterior portion of the scapula [shoulder blade]” so-named because its name translates into “like a raven’s beak” in Greek, and that fracturing it is impressively difficult and unusual?

Steyn knows all that, and much more. Too much for a man of 34. In fast bowler’s years that’s about 68.

Unlike most players Steyn has spoken candidly of his frustration at the healing and rehabilitation process, and of his worry about hurting something else while he works to resolve the original problem.

“I go for a run up the mountain and I could get a hamstring injury,” he said in October, when he was emerging from his second major shoulder injury.

“Or I finally get over all of this and I go and roll my ankle getting out of the car.”

Close but not quite: less than three months later a freshly repaired Steyn tore a ligament off his left heel by stepping awkwardly into a foothole while bowling against India in the Newlands Test.

Square one, here we go again …

More often heard than Steyn’s honesty is the kind of view expressed by boxer Ronda Rousey: “I’ve separated my shoulder and my collarbone; I’ve messed up my knee a million times. I’ve broken my foot in several places. I’ve broken my toe a bunch, broken my nose a couple of times, and had a bunch of other annoying little injuries, like turf toe [spraining the ligaments of the big toe] and arthritis and tendonitis. It’s part of the game.”

If self-harm was a crime you’d have a hard time getting that argument past a judge, and if you think that’s a reach consider that in December 2016 the US Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from former National Football League (NFL) players against a total settlement amount of US$1-billion the NFL offered previously concussed players to shut up and go away and take their brain damage with them.

A billion dollars sounds decent, but in March the players and the families of those who have died — some of diseases and conditions doctors have blamed on playing gridiron football — went back to court to file charges of fraud against the NFL for allegedly trying to delay payments, sometimes aggressively.

A month later the NFL lawyered up to argue that a special investigator be appointed to stop “widespread fraud from infecting” the settlement plan.

“Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble,” Benjamin Franklin said, and that’s happens almost without fail.

We record and remember players’ performances at length and in detail. But their injuries, the effects of which may linger long after they have graced the arena and entertained us royally, are invariably footnotes in their biographies.

It’s time we saw players for what they are: human before anything else, injuries and all, and deserving of more consideration on that score.

The other score? By comparison it matters nought.