It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ajax Cape Town this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
A 1‑2 win over Free State Stars, a place in the next round, and the quiet arithmetic every supporter does on the walk home: how many more until a final?
Two goals and a mark of 8.22 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
“I want to be playing for trophies while my legs still let me.” Nothing in that sentence is a transfer request, and nobody at Ajax Cape Town heard it as anything else.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ajax Cape Town this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
At 18 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
3 in front and in complete control, and it finished with Platinum Stars the happier side. There is no version of this afternoon that Ajax Cape Town will enjoy reviewing.
At 34 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.02 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Ajax Cape Town can pretend not to have heard.
Two of the goals had his name somewhere on them, which is the afternoon a manager wants from anybody asked to both create and finish. 7.82, and 2 involvements.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ajax Cape Town this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The terraces31 Aug 2026
Ajax Cape Town spend $520.0K on the signing the town wanted
It is the rarest sequence in football: supporters ask for something, and the club goes and does it. $520.0K for Thabo Nkwana, and for one week nobody is complaining about anything.
Add another name to the list: AFC Leopards have asked the question everybody in the game has been asking about Emanuele Mazza. The answer from Ajax Cape Town has not changed — yet.
In brief
SquadWords at Ajax Cape Town training over how hard people work
Player ratingsRivaldo Lorch was on a different afternoon to everybody else
Two goals and a mark of 8.42 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Dean Dala will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Ajax Cape Town the goodbyes have quietly begun.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Ajax Cape Town, and it is not being withdrawn.
Khama Kekana was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
2 goals inside twenty minutes with Khama Kekana in the middle of it, and University of Pretoria unable to get near the ball long enough to change anything. Some matches are won before the first drink.
$13.1M is a serious amount of money and it does not play centre-forward. Everybody in the dressing room knows who used to be looked at when it went wrong.
The accountants will call it good business and they will be right, which is not the point anybody outside the boardroom is making. Rivaldo Mphela was one of the reasons people came, and $13.1M does not replace that by itself.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ajax Cape Town this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.