A bad week for sport. First, the still-murky death of 25-year-old Bafana Bafana midfielder Jayden Adams, found dead in a house in Schotsche Kloof. Then front-ranker Luqobo Makwedini collapsed during a training session with French rugby club AS Béziers, dying later in hospital.
Then there is the continuing tang of battle around the football World Cup in the US, not all of it on the field.
If any proof were needed about how remotely proper football figures in the American psyche, google “soccer mom”, a vaguely pejorative term for a suburban housewife who spends much of her awake time shuttling kids to sporting events, some of which may even be what the US calls soccer.
They’re not called “football moms” or “baseball moms”. Certainly never would they ever be called “basketball moms” because that might require uncomfortable self-reflection. No, just soccer, ranked so low on the US sporting tree that Fifa selecting the country as one of the three co-hosts of the tournament is itself a miracle in the days when there are so few.
It’s partly because of this that the current administration’s phone call to Fifa president Gianni Infantino over Folarin Balogun’s red card lands like an exhausted migrating Canada goose on a frozen lake: messily.
Just as well the US exited the tournament after losing the next game 4-1 to Belgium (imagine that: Belgium!) because they would never have recovered from the taint of political interference securing them a win.
Meanwhile, football’s reputation is partly salvaged by England, the inventor of the beautiful game, advancing to the semis, thanks to the deft moves of instant folk hero Jude Bellingham.
This week, just as England were squaring up against Argentina for a slot in the final, the stakes were huge, overloaded with symbolism 44 years and a couple of days after the rust-streaked ocean liner SS Canberra returned from the Falkland Islands with its freight of battle-shocked commandos and paratroopers. Las Malvinas, etc …