Roy and I have just returned from the Twickenham
Sevens Tournament in London where we had been invited to assist with the major
preparations, largely on culinary intake, for the Zimbabwe national sevens
team. The team coach, Ivantoo Stillplay, had made us most welcome and requested
all players speak English in our presence or be dropped. The only white player
in the squad, Simon Mann, on tour leave from Chikurubi Prison in central Harare
& now fluent in Swahili, kept perusing the crowd for any sign of his once
collaborator & now confirmed traitor, Mark 'Mywords' Thatcher, who has
taken up his mother's recently vacated room at the Ritz.
The teams cook & assistant coach |
Kawasaki Hondo enjoys a snack before the match |
Dwarte leaves the field |
The first time we hooked up with the Kenyan team
was at an impromptu prayer meeting called by traveling shangaan & champion
spear thrower, Billy 'the Spear' nThroat, as guests at a Maasai reed dance on
the outskirts of the Amboseli National Park.
The shangaan Billy was sponsored
by Kenyan Airways, a company yet to be formed at the time due to a
parliamentary delay on its proposed 50 million Kwatcha bailout for its first
year of operations, and had been hired because of his belief that divine
intervention would pull them through. His position went as quickly as the
hapless team who exited the tournament in the first round to be ferried back to
Nairobi on Kenyan Airways' inaugural flight in a refurbished Brittania turbo
prop. Kenya's game with the Kiwis made the latter look more like roasted goats
than fleet footed sevens players in the first half, only for Kenya to
capitulate a 17- nil lead at half-time to lose by a whopping 31-17. The
coach has apparently banned all curry tiffins at half-time for future sevens
tours.
Billy "The Spear" in action |
No comments:
Post a Comment