Julia Beffon

Can Bafana be judged by their ugly jersey?

But, thinking of Henry's cheating while watching the National Football League (the gridiron game) on ESPN last weekend gave me an idea.

In the NFL, coaches are able to challenge rulings on the field. If the challenge fails, their team is docked one of its time-outs.

When, not if, soccer finally gives in and uses video replays to review important calls, Fifa should introduce something similar.

There are no time-outs in soccer, so why not rather use substitutes?

If a manager/coach decides the referee has made an awful decision or missed something, the coach can challenge it.

If the challenge is upheld, the ref's decision is overturned.

If the replay shows the ref to be correct, the challenging team will lose one of its substitutes.

What, you might ask, happens if the team has already made all of its substitutions?

Well, an incorrect challenge would then mean forfeiting one of their players - as if he had been red-carded.

This system could also be used to judge the performance of referees: one whose decisions are regularly overturned should not be allowed to handle any more matches until his skills improve.

Also, it'll stop manager/coaches from whining about the refs - if they have the courage of their convictions, they can test them during the match.

What do you think, Mr Blatter?

• Some team names just make you smile, like Eleven Men In Flight (Swaziland) and Dangerous Darkies (South Africa).

Rejoining the ranks are the Tampa Bay Rowdies, who disappeared in 1993 when the North American Soccer League collapsed.

South African-born Roy Wegerle was one of their stars.

The resuscitated Rowdies will be playing in a yet-to-be-named league with Kenny Dalglish's son, Paul, as coach.

We're unlikely to see them on our screens any time soon, but what brought the Rowdies to mind was watching the two recent Bafana Bafana friendlies.

Before South Africa's re-admission to international football, I always dreamt that the national team shirt would be something like that of the Rowdies (white with green and yellow sleeves), and there was a resemblance in the early days.

I'm sure someone could track the correlation between the deterioration of the national team's play and how ugly the jerseys have become.

Against Japan and Jamaica we looked like a poor man's Brazil, or - perhaps frighteningly closer to the truth - that Carlos Alberto Parreira had scraped the sponsor's logo off the Golden Arrows shirts and sent that team, rather than Bafana, out to play.

But perhaps that's an insult to Arrows.