There was a time when sports fans had few avenues available to vent their frustration when the teams they supported were going through a rough patch.
Those who had access to radio sports talk-shows called in after poor performances and had a full go at the players, the coaches and even management as they searched for some form of therapeutic relief.
This wasn’t the preferred method to ease the pain for all fans and some elected to share their agony in a more concise manner and put pen to paper, articulating their unhappiness in letters to newspapers.
When that did not seem to ignite a reaction that was to their satisfaction, fans took their protests to the stadiums. This is where things got tricky because they sometimes booed their own players, hurled missiles at the coaches as they sat on the bench and, in extreme cases, even blocked the exit to venues as they tried to get their hands on those they perceived to be the cause of the poor performances.
I’ve seen many coaches exit stadiums in the back of Nyala armoured police vehicles over the years. So often that it pretty much stopped being viewed as an anomaly and we become desensitised to this troubling trend.
This phenomenon has become such a part of the landscape of SA football that even revered coaches such as Pitso Mosimane, Clive Barker and others have exited stadiums in the company of riot police at one time or another as incensed fans desperately tried to get their hands on them.
Incredibly, the madness didn’t always end there and when some fans felt they were still not getting through to management even after this kind of drama, they took things to even crazier heights.
I remember a few years ago when a couple of irate Moroka Swallows supporters decided to kidnap their coach after a run of results they felt were too ghastly to stomach. The Birds had lost two out of 10 matches under Walter da Silva, and the hooligans decided this was cause enough to bundle the coach into the boot of a car.
The Brazilian had received several death threats from anonymous people prior to his kidnapping but never thought that things would descend to such alarming depths. They drove around Johannesburg with him in the boot for about three hours before finally releasing him unhurt at a shopping centre parking lot. They then made off with R1,500 he had in his pocket for good measure.
While Gordon Igesund was not kidnapped by fans during his time at Orlando Pirates, the treatment meted out to him was equally shocking as an angry group of people arrived at a training session in a rickety Nissan E20 minibus and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him.
Pirates were actually top of the table at the time, but this minor detail was not important to the hooligans who insisted that the team were not playing the kind of crisp football they wanted.
The trend has continued and even Craig Rosslee had to contend with unwelcome visitors during a training session when he was at AmaZulu.
Thankfully the times have changed, although the fans too have evolved with the shifting landscape. They have more creative and sophisticated methods these days and will not be silenced. Even the spectre of Covid-19 has been unable to prevent them from communicating their feelings to their teams.
The fans have not returned to the stadiums since the outbreak of the pandemic early in 2020, but their voices remain just as loud as in the old days. Their use of various social media tools to connect directly with their clubs is extremely effective and actually impressive.
Hell, Kaizer Chiefs fans used social media to organise a highly successful protest march to the Soweto side’s headquarters in Naturena to great effect in March. They were not happy with the way things were going at the ailing giant, and so effective was the march that other teams have threatened to take a page from their digital handbook and follow suit.
There was no rickety Nissan E20 in sight in Naturena on the day, yet the actions of the supporters were far louder and more effective than the hooligans who beat up Igesund all those years ago. Just imagine: Swallows fans once kidnapped the coach to make their point!
• Follow Ntloko on Twitter at @ntlokom
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