FNB Stadium is a powder keg

Sometimes one feels like one is tempting fate or dicing with death. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but what happened at the FNB Stadium on Wednesday night screams of a disaster waiting to happen.

And the day it happens — not that one is wishing for it — it will strike a devastating blow.

The chaotic traffic control and the commotion caused outside the Calabash keeps repeating itself whenever there is a big match — as was the case after the Kaizer Chiefs goalless draw with Mamelodi Sundowns.

A game of this magnitude is always going to be an attraction. Moreso in this case when you had a resurgent Chiefs that appear hellbent to shed the skunk stench of being also rans and and seemingly set to reinvent themselves as credible competitors worthy of being considered as contenders for the league crown.

The reinforcements made by Amakhosi, disdainfully dismissed as rejects picked from the dustbin, helped them storm to a flying start to the season.

Two in particular, the former Orlando Pirates duo of Paseka Mako and Thabiso Monyane, were in the mood to tame alligators, and plausibly prevented Sundowns from exploiting pockets of space.

Marauding Masandawana

They helped stem the tide of Chiefs being made mincemeat by the marauding Masandawana which had become regular programming in recent matches.

You could say it’s early days, but is it not the early bird that catches the fattest worm? But I digress...

It is the off-the-field mayhem that ensued after the match that makes one want to weep.

What plays out is a patience thinning, anxiety increasing, danger inviting jumble sale of all things uncivil, as the precinct converts into a cesspool of complete disregard for the rule of law, common courtesy and decency.

Because of little to non-existent traffic control, navigating your way out of the stadium becomes an accident-avoiding exercise. Which leaves one wondering about the wisdom of increasing ticket sales from the initially allocated 60,000 to 75,000 for such a high-profile night match — in midweek, nogal.

With people returning from work and rushing to the stadium in a country not renowned for the greatest public transport system, this is courting trouble.

2010 best practice

The game started 15 minutes late after the advertised 7.30pm kickoff.

It is clear all the learnings gained from being exposed to the best practice of hosting the World Cup in 2010 have been erased from memory.

As much as we need to hold authorities like law enforcement accountable for poor planning, we must also ask ourselves what we can do to play our part to make the stadium experience smoother for us as supporters.

We are normalising the abnormal behaviour of drifting away from simple decency.

Chew on this message sent to me by a frustrated fan who is urging us to act: “At some point we need to be sober enough and look at our behaviour ko [at the] stadium. There’s no need for us to be stuck in traffic for three hours and, no, this is not a law enforcement matter. We need to do better as a people. We need no one to tell us to be better [and this applies to much more than stadium attendance but almost everything about us as a people].”