Marked for Kermit Williams
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Squad18 Mar 2030
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Black Aces this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad18 Mar 2030
The medical room confirms 27 days on the sidelines for Kermit Williams, and a plan built around him now has to be rebuilt.
Squad18 Mar 2030
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Nzubechi Sunday trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Match16 Feb 2030
8 matches without a win for Black Aces
The run now stands at 8, and the questions being asked around Black Aces are no longer polite ones.
Squad18 Feb 2030
56 days, the scan says, and scans are kinder than reality. The fixtures in that window have just become somebody else’s job.
Player ratings18 Feb 2030
Ninety minutes of Thulani Vilakazi at his very best
Marked 8.32. Players have careers without a single afternoon like this in them, and he has just had one in front of everybody at Black Aces.
Match16 Feb 2030
It needed Mandla Jali to find the net to bring anything home at all: 2‑2 against Platinum Stars, and half the dressing room will call it a point won.
Squad18 Feb 2030
Athenkosi Tonisi falls out with a teammate over standards
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.
Squad18 Feb 2030
“I pick players who do the work. All of it.” No name was spoken; every camera still turned to Royce Malatji, and the manager let it.
Squad18 Feb 2030
It is not much of a headline and it is the reason players believe the next promise. Black Aces told Royce Malatji something would happen and then it happened, which in this industry passes for remarkable.
Player ratings18 Feb 2030
Successful dribbles: 6. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
Boardroom18 Feb 2030
The Black Aces production line keeps running
24 graduates out of an academy now rated 9 out of 20. Clubs this size survive on exactly that, and the town knows every name.