50 Greatest African Players: Introduction
I’d like to announce a new venture I’ll be collaborating on with a few friends: Sandals For Goalposts. I will still strive to post on this – A Water Carrier, my personal football blog – as much as possible, still, but it’ll be the more self-indulgent stuff. For this new site the focus will be, initially, on the African Cup of Nations, so you can find all my posts related to that on there, but we’ll have a mixture of serious shizzle and light-hearted jizz-jazz. Also, we’ll be compiling the 50 Greatest African Players of all-time. Here is the introduction that I did for it, to read the rest you’ll have to navigate onto the site:
Africa is a continent of great diversity but, despite this diversity, the countries part of it share much in common – not only their colonial origins, but the similarities in the obstacles they face. Football, at times, is one of the few solutions to the problems. For days leading up to a match in volatile regions, people have been known to stop the bloodshed all in the name of the beautiful game. Bloodshed doesn’t grind to a halt in African only – when Hamas and Fatah fought each other for control of Gaza in 2007, the only day the guns fell silent was when Al Ahly took on Zamalek in the Cairo derby.
Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free. Football provides hope. African boys and men only have to look at the African players plying their trade in Europe to hope of what-could-be. In 1965, one of the first rags-to-riches story was of the Malian Salif Keita, uncle of Barcelona’s Seydou Keita, who escaped in secret to France after hearing Malian officials were likely to stop him from moving to France. In the twenty-first century, several players playing for major clubs in the world are African or have parents who are. Certainly, on the monetary side of the game, football clubs, particularly in Europe, scramble for African talent in a way that is reminiscent of how the west scrambled for the continent’s resources.
You can read the rest of this article at Sandals For Goalposts.