OPINION: Empty stadiums suck the soul out of football

Let’s face it, Bafana Bafana home games are not well-attended at the best of times, but if you had told me two years ago I would be standing in an empty FNB Stadium, watching an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier between South Africa and Ghana, because of a viral pandemic that had swept the globe, I would have looked at you like you were one of those people who has thousands of tins of baked beans in an underground shelter and who believes that the world is run by a cabal of super-wealthy people who are actually lizards.

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But here we are, and here I was,  on Thursday, staring into a mass of orange seats (who decided orange was the colour for these seats, were they Dutch?) as Bafana and the Black Stars went about one of many matches across the universe, in these apocalyptic times, that is played out in all-but total silence.

This was my first live match since the pandemic hit – the Premier Soccer League continue to not allow media into their games, apart from the official broadcasters, which does beg the question, what are you hiding?  Maybe it’s simply a case of of them not being arsed to pay to sanitise the media tribune, but it’s still ridiculous.

Attending a match live, it has to be said, gives you an amplified understanding of how important it is that sound engineers are there to enhance the experience with fake crowd noises on television.

It’s a bit like watching a training session, in the form of an actual match, and I would encourage those who foot the bill to get in a live ‘DJ’ of sorts, to jazz up proceedings. There could at least be an assortment of chants or songs blasting out of a PA system from time to time.

“Shosholoza,” in surround sound across the pitch may have inspired Bafana to beat Ghana on Thursday, we will never  know now. One of the blessings of empty stadiums is that we don’t have to hear “THOSE TRUMPETS” as Spain’s Xabi Alonso once said, referring in a not generously-intended way to vuvuzelas.

Seriously, if you wish ill on someone with a nasty hangover, fire off a vuvuzela in their presence. For a journalist who isn’t a fan of traffic, there was also a lovely absence of cars blocking the route into the stadium, and hopefully the large amount of traffic police who attend these high-profile matches, mostly doing what looks a lot like an enormous amount of nothing, were better employed elsewhere on Thursday evening.

Mostly, however, watching football with no fans is watching football with the soul ripped out of it. The game needs its people, to give it any kind of romance. Otherwise it’s just brutalist architecture in the form of the beautiful game, however many mind-boggling goals Lionel Messi nets, or silky feints Percy Tau shows off.

May this pandemic end soon, or at least ease off for good, and may we get back to a colourful cacophony of song and dance on a match day.

Hell, I’ll even put up with a pinch of vuvuzela.

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