'A knife in the ball means the muti is dead!”' October 22, 2009 Soccer in South Africa has changed enormously over the last 15 or 20 years…Former Usuthu legend George Dearnaley reminds of how things were back in the day…

AmaZulu in the early 1990’s was a very ‘traditional’ club, and the players adhered to the rituals and the ceremonies without too many complaints.

I had ‘bathed’ in some foul-smelling brown stuff a few times, and I had stood over and wafted the smoke from a small fire in our dressing room all over me. This fire was made out of some small pieces of wood and other herbs that would make me invincible!

I had stuff smeared on me, and I wore my jersey the one match after spraying a whole can of deodorant on it to kill the smell of some ‘muti’.

So there weren’t too many things that fazed me during my time at AmaZulu. The only thing I refused to do was to drink or eat anything that was considered ‘muti’. I thought I had seen it all, but an incident in a match against Umtata Bush Bucks left me speechless.

I was injured for the match, and took my place in the stands with the supporters. I enjoyed sitting in among the home fans when I wasn’t playing, listening to their comments on my teammates and finding out how they watched the match. At half-time the score between AmaZulu and Umtata Bucks was 0 – 0.

As the players made their way into the dressing rooms, the Bucks reserve players strolled across the field and had a kick around in the one goal area. One of their players picked the ball up and started smacking it into the net.

The Usuthu supporters were getting aggressive and they started shouting at the Bucks players. The stadium security ran on to the field and one of them confiscated the ball from the Bucks players. He walked over to the grandstand and in full view of the home supporters he stabbed the ball!

This was met with a loud roar. One old guy next to me explained that Bucks were going to attack that specific goal in the second half, and that they were ‘blessing’ the goal area with the ball, but by stabbing the ball, AmaZulu had killed the muti…the game ended 0 – 0.