A Golden Cage

In the first of his monthly columns for KICK OFF, Carlos Amato wonders why South African players are not making the impact they used to on Europe’s big leagues.

- Carlos Amato

IMAGINE getting paid R500 000 a month. Imagine the sweet, sexy ping of the SMS notification from your bank on pay-day mornings. (The take home-figure would be less delicious, but still.)

Now imagine getting paid the same sum for doing NOTHING. Dololo. Not a stitch of work. Even better, some might say – and if we’re honest, they would have a point.

But for Thulani Serero, and for any other footballer who finds himself paid and unplayed at a major club, that ping of unearned moolah doesn’t ping so sweetly. It sounds wrong, feels wrong. Exiled from the senior squad at Ajax Amsterdam in July, Serero has spent the last five months in lonesome purgatory, training alone on the fringes of the reserve squad and itching for a move to a club willing and able to foot his R6million-a-year wage bill.

By the time you read this column, Serero may have been liberated, perhaps by Reading manager Jaap Stam. (I wouldn’t want to be liberated by Stam myself, but beggars can’t be choosers.)

Needless to say, Serero doesn’t need too much of our pity. This is a gifted and rich young man with years of glory ahead, if and when things turn for him. But even if he does escape from Amsterdam in this transfer window, this glum episode marks an anticlimactic end to an Ajax career that once held glowing promise.