The TRUTH: Ajax Cape Town coach ROGER DE SA on Cecil Lolo's funeral: the grief, the pain, the LIES

ROGER THAT: De Sa's tweet on the day of Cecil Lolo's tragic death

ROGER DE SA left home for Cecil Lolo’s funeral at 6am in the morning. He returned home at midnight on Sunday exhausted and depressed. Now he is angry. Fuming.

Cecil Sonwabile Lolo was the “True Warrior” in De Sa’s Urban Warriors, a man who emerged from nowhere, with nothing, to become a professional footballer. His death at the age of 27 in a car accident two weeks ago left Ajax Cape Town, part of one of the world’s largest footballing franchises, shattered.

This morning, when De Sa took the side for their first training session since last Friday, Lolo’s seat in the dressing room was left empty and covered in flowers. De Sa says: “That’s how the players felt about Cecil. He was popular, he was respected by all.”

Which is why De Sa is eager to end the witch-hunt orchestrated by Robert Marawa and ANC MEC for Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture Pemmy Majodina after the funeral. De Sa rubbishes claims the players were banned from attending, he points out that Majodina was nearly as late for the funeral as he was and asks WHY DIDN’T ROBERT MARAWA ATTEND?

I’ll leave Roger to tell his story:

“Neal, all this “we didn’t care about Lolo” is pure bullshit. Let me start at the beginning. The day he died. Devastating. We did’t know what to do.

“We sit with the family. Three little kids from two moms who live with his mother. The player has no insurance, nothing whatsoever. No funeral plan. NOTHING. So our chairman Ari Efstathiou says we’ll provide an educational trust for kids, least we can do.

“Then let’s look after the family. His mother and other people he looked after. About eight of them. We have to look after them too. Help them recover from Cecil’s death, they all lived off his money.

“But for the kids (a daughter of six months, two boys of 5 and 8), let’s get a proper education. No company would do that, you know that Neal. We are doing everything we can here.

“Then we retire the number 21. His shirt. We’ll never use it again. Nobody’s ever done that, not even for Senzo.

“We name a stand after him. Did Pirates do that? Then there’s the memorial service in Khayalitsha, his base, his place, where he lived with his family.

“That’s followed (last Friday) by a memorial service for all supporters at our base, Ikamva. And yes, all of our players were involved in both memorials, they said their farewells, they cried, they cared.

“We are always in contact with the family, said we’ll help with funeral arrangements. They wanted to go somewhere remote in Eastern Cape. That wasn’t ideal for us but we had to respect it. We paid coffin, funeral, food, in the region of R50,000.

“We do all that. The one thing I don’t like thinking, and Ari is too scared to say, is everyone is saying the club stopped the players from going. That’s bullshit. I went. Last training session was Saturday morning, next one was today. We’d never stop anyone from going.

“They’re trying to say club stopped people from going. That not true. Some Chippa United players went, they were local. But there was nobody from the PSL, SAFA, no other club. For me to get there, I left at 6am got home after 11pm. How do you expect everybody to get there?

“It was a real trip. First we flew from Cape Town to East London, drove to Butterworth 120km. I thought that was it but then there was the drive to the village (Chebe in Centane).

“Neal, you’re English. You've got no idea, a dust road for about 50km, not even a four-by-four can go on that thing, we crossed river, water, rocks. And all of it in an Avis rental car, it must be buggered.

“We managed to get there 12.30, the funeral had started, we already told the mother we’d be late, she respected that.

“We were there. Listened to a couple of speeches. Then the minister started the real thing. Coffin was carried, Cecil was buried. After that we had to leave, needed three hours to get back to airport. We spoke to the father and the mother. We did everything we could.

“I hear stories Ajax stopped players from attending, all this hogwash. This minister arrived 45 minutes before me, having a political go. Using it as a political tool. DA against ANC. Majodina her name was. She looked disappointed when we got there.

“It’s about Lolo, not politics. Nobody stopped anyone from going, the club felt that’s what they were going to do from the beginning. The family chose the burial site, what more do you want?

“I have to ask. Why didn’t Robert Marawa go? I was there. Some close friends of his were there. But some people just can’t get there. That’s life today, you know what I mean.

“Everyone’s climbing on a bandwagon, trying to be all cultural, it’s very disappointing. Ari is trying to protect the players, obviously they didn’t go. No player came and asked to come because they knew where it was.

“Two memorial services, armbands, minute’s silence, we even stopped the match to clap in the 21st minute. All these things were done. Lolo’s seat is empty in the dressing room with flowers on it. We’re going to put a picture up. We respected his culture.

“I saw a picture of Senzo’s grave the other day, he doesn’t even have a grave stone yet. All the people who are having a go, these soccer journalists who never played football, where were they? Did they pay their respects?

Cecil was “The Real Warrior” to me. We had a very good relationship. I was devastated. It only sank in when I got to the parent’s home in the morning. It hit me.

“You go through it, feel every tear, yet here people are lying about players not being allowed to attend the funeral. What kind of story is that?”

Should any media houses/sites wish to use excerpts from this EXCLUSIVE story, feel free, just credit. And stop trying to capitalise on Cecil Lolo's death.

UPDATE: November 11: This story has been used by Kickoff, The Citizen, News24 and The Times.

FOR BALANCE:
1 What Cecil's dad says: http://www.dispatchlive.co.za/news/lolos-dad-feels-let-down-by-ajax/


2 What Senzo's dad says: http://www.timeslive.co.za/sport/soccer/2015/11/11/Senzo-Meyiwas-dad-furious-at-Khoza-for-going-public-with-insurance-payout

When sport really doesn't mean a lot. A tribute to Cecil Patrick Barnett 5/11/1926-19/01/2010

I GUESS by now regular readers of this blog will have noticed things have been a little quiet around these parts since the end of England's cricket tour to South Africa.

There's a good reason for that. The day before I was due to fly home, my wife Tracy's dad Patrick passed away. Just after England had slumped to defeat in Johannesburg. Times like this, sport is rendered meaningless.

Writing about South Africa coach Mickey Arthur's resignation, Arsenal's FA Cup failure against Stoke or Martin Samuel's pathetic World Cup-in-danger piece in the Daily Mail yesterday just doesn't really matter.

Pat Barnett, my father-in-law, was no ordinary guy. Before he went in Wycombe Hospital in the early hours of January 19, aged 83, he had written down every detail of his life in the army at the end of the war. Like he'd known what was coming.

Forced to leave school at 13 when they ran out of teachers in Ealing in 1942, he was in the cadets at 15 and went off with the Black Watch, that feared bunch of Highlanders, when he was barely 18. He didn't have a single kilt in his genes, it was just, as he explained in his beautifully self-concocted way: "They didn't have enough Scotch to fill the ranks."

So off he went to Greece and Egypt, surviving fatal truck crashes, endless journeys through Europe, the remnants of civil war in Athens, nights out in downtown Cairo and angry German prisoners of war on the Suez Canal. You want sport? I give you dear old Pat volunteering to play for the German prisoners against the Wardens in a hockey match in the middle of the desert watched by hundreds of bored troops. He still has the match report, typed out by a bespectacled colleague. It's like Escape to Victory without Sylvester Stallone. The Germans apparently ran the camp themselves, never tried to get out and only got difficult when the English found their beer brewing kit.

It's fascinating stuff, reading the war-time memoirs of a self-educated carpenter who gained an in-service promotion to sergeant. There's little doubt his words would stir people more than my own current book-writing efforts. I couldn't put his bulky scrap-book down until I had read the last words, seen the last sepia snapshot. There will never be another selfless generation like his.

But it's been a struggle trying to prepare for the funeral of a patriarch we thought would be around forever.

Before I left for the cricket tour he was suffering a low red platelet count. They struggled to solve the medical riddle, but he was happy, strong, still walking his greyhound Ella up and down the steep hill to the village.

He was the perfect patient. He never complained, despite the endless blood samples and bone-marrow taps. He'd make even the toughest National Health Service nurse smile with his banter. We always thought he'd battle through it, like he did the heart attack 15 years ago. When it came, the end was sudden, swift.

I returned from the mid-summer battle between two of the world's most respected cricketing nations to find myself drowning in a sea of mid-winter tears.

But after a difficult week (and there are more to come), the painful arrangements are in place. Tracy and her sister Lisa have put together what should be a fine send-off on Monday with their mum Georgina, who lived through the Blitz in Bethnal Green.

The order of service for the funeral can be found at the end of this piece, but it tells just a part of the story.

Pat was unapologetically old-fashioned. Guess you have to be when you were born in thee 1920s. The word "gentleman" was designed for him. He'd wear a tie to dinner, even a McDonald's with the grandchildren.

I never once heard him have a go at either of his daughters, he never needed to. He dealt with family crises with a look and a smile. Tracy and I were up until 2am last night, trying to write her tribute for the funeral next Monday.

He was a right character, plunging through the ceiling when he was building a loft room, building train sets and a miniature village for the grandchildren, he even put together three barrel organs with his own hands. They want a piece for the well-known "Barrel Organ Monthly" magazine now. Might be the toughest assignment of my journalistic career, that one. Harder even than this. A sportswriter trying to put down his feelings about the death of a loved one.

You visited here to read football? He never played the game. But he'd be up at the local Epilepsy Centre in the cold every Sunday morning, offering his gruff advice to Charlie and Harry and defending referees when the parents got out of hand on the touchline. He wasn't the best watching the boys play cricket, but I know when all four of us, Charlie, Harry, Kriss and I turn out for Chalfont St Peter's Sunday second team, he gets a twinkle in his eye. And it made you think of the childhood he had torn away from him by the war.

At the end of his bitter-sweet memoirs, Pat wrote: "I didn't do anything very brave but I made the numbers up."

Typical of the man. But to us he was the bravest, biggest of figures. In this small corner of Buckinghamshire, his passing is far more important than West Ham's new owners, the Superbowl or Andy Murray's efforts in Australia.

When his daughters Lisa and Tracy first started doing cartwheels, Pat turned himself into a gymnastics coach of some repute, a bit like Richard Williams, non-tennis-playing dad of Serena and Venus. Learning for his daughters' sakes, becoming a self-made expert.

He would be there to catch them when they slipped off the beam, his safe hands would be there when, in the grainy old videos, they flew around the parallel bars, high above inadequate matting at Chesham Leisure Centre.

Tracy and I wrote last night that he was always there to catch them when they fell. For forty years. All their lives. And now he's gone. There's crying to be done. He'll be missed. But he's only up in the loft. He's not that far away.

http://www.careprint.co.uk/proofs/16315ss.pdf