In Africa, like South America, it’s what you do on the ball that counts, not how you play the game. So when the Red Bull Street Style World Finals came to Cape Town, it was a homecoming for everything the world’s best football tricksters stand for.
To the packed-to-the-rafters crowd, the 2010 Red Bull Street Style World Finals seems to be more than just another sporting event. Up in the stands, it feels like a celebration in honour of someone returning from an extended absence, and though everything is familiar on the surface, there are differences.
The wanderer has grown, matured and learned, but there’s no doubt as to where his roots and heart lie. As a consequence, the arena is being driven by the kind of energy you wouldn’t expect to find at a freestyle football competition.
Or to put it another way, the crowd are going completely and utterly bananas.
Standing in front of these 1,200 people, on a raised circular stage in a short-lived structure next to the Castle Of Good Hope – South Africa’s oldest building temporarily twinned with its newest – is a diminutive Nigerian boy. And, apart from a football balanced perfectly on his head, all he is wearing is his underpants. He didn’t start out like this.
At the beginning of his round- robin match-up, young Habib Makanjuola was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, socks, and trainers. But he steadily divested those garments during his three-minute heat, all the while maintaining control of the ball, balancing it on his head or his big toe. You try removing a shoe and sock from a foot while balancing a ball on it.
The crowd, naturally, rather likes this. One, Habib has just turned 11 and is about 4ft high, begging instant underdog status. Two, his tricks are highly original. And three, he represents what the audience has known all along: by being held in Africa, freestyle football has come home. It might have a new name, but at its essence, doing tricks with a ball is nothing new to Africans, and specifically Southern Africans.
For decades, a particular kind of township soccer has been played on any available open space. Games of diski, as it’s known, are struck up on anything from a grassless patch of distinctive red African earth, to the concrete of a school playground. Usually a tennis ball is used, but anything vaguely round will do, and the main object of the game is to display one’s ball skills rather than anything as crass as actually scoring a goal.
The basics of juggling, trapping and balancing the ball are a given – what’s crucial is the style you display in the execution thereof. Street cred is made and shattered on this alone.
For the full story pick up the July Red Bulletin Magazine.
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