Control de Sigatoka

It is half-time. The Olympique de Buea players are sitting on the ground behind the reserves’ bench. They are drinking and listening to the coach and the vice- president. The vice-president truly acts as a substitute for the club president. He is making tactical comments and is worried about a specific player’s injury. Essomba’s voice is louder than all the others. It is clear that he is not happy with his team-mates’ performances.

I am feeling somewhat ill at ease at the side of the field. Just before the start of the match, I heard disturbing news about last year’s match between Bamboutos and Olympique de Buea here in Mbouda, which ended in a 1-2 victory for the away team. Bamboutos did not only lose that particular match but also their chances of winning the D1 competition that year. The Bamboutos supporters became so angry and frustrated that they walked onto the field with a wooden bench and used it to hit the referee several times on the head. The referee died a few days later in hospital.

Today, the club executives and players of Olympique de Buea have expressed fears that the supporters may become violent again. The driver even suggested parking the bus in front of the police station so that the team could seek pro- tection in case of unrest. The vice-president refused to do so.

Football is a spectator sport, Essomba told me, and of course he is right. ‘There’s no point in playing matches if nobody’s watching us,’ he said. Sup- porters can encourage the players to give outstanding performances, but they can

also obstruct the match through violence. In Europe, spectator violence – popu- larly referred to as hooliganism – is one of the major problems surrounding foot- ball. In Cameroon, I have witnessed only a few instances of spectator violence in the first-division league. One was at last Sunday’s match between Olympique de Buea and PWD Bamenda when some of the supporters started throwing rocks at other supporters. We heard the story on Monday. Another case of violence took place in the stadium in Bafoussam, after which FECAFOOT did not allow the field to be used for several weeks.

In Cameroon, the level of spectator violence differs in each of the three offi- cial competitions and also according to the importance of the match. The tenden- cy is for more violence during important matches and the (mini-)interpools. The level of violence also tends to be greater within the second and third divisions than in the D1 competition. In this respect, Cameroonians make a distinction between town matches and village matches. Town matches are usually matches between the bigger clubs in the D1 competition and are relatively peaceful; and village matches are between the smaller clubs in the lower divisions and can be relatively violent.

The different structure of the three football divisions is one of the reasons why violence is more widespread in the lower divisions. The teams in the first division play 30 matches in a season and one individual match is therefore not particularly important. In the second and third divisions, however, the teams from the province and division respectively, are divided into pools with six to eight teams, depending on the numbers of teams in the area. These teams do not play as many matches as their counterparts in the D1 competition and only the teams that end up in first place in their respective pools will continue to play matches. For many second- and third-division teams, the football season is over after only a few months. This indicates that each and every match is important, especially in the first months of the season, and supporters thus tend to support their teams more fiercely.

The teams that make it through the pools then face another difficult competi- tion: the mini-interpools. However, there is more security available at the mini- interpools and the interpools.

Village matches are said to be synonymous with bad pitches, lousy stadiums and plenty of violence. To begin with the first statement, most fields in Came- roon are far from flat, even the ones in Buea, Limbe and here in Mbouda. Some- times when watching matches, I got the feeling that winning a game here is a lottery and depends on whether the field is ‘cooperating’ with a team or not. Ashu told me that the fields in the villages are the worst of all. Buea Boys played three village matches this season (2003) – one in Ekondo Titi, one in Idenao and one in Bakwa Supper. In the second game, ‘the pitch was too stony. If the ball

happens to fall, it bounces and changes direction. It was an inferior place.’ In the third case, ‘it was a very nice field but it did not have the dimensions of an offi- cial field. It was really small.’ Players rarely slide deliberately on Cameroonian fields, the obvious reason being that the fields are too hard and players will certainly get injured if they do.

The fields in the villages typically belong to primary or secondary-schools and are not really up to the standard required for official matches. One should there- fore not be surprised that the field is not surrounded by a fence, a brick wall or anything that would classify the whole structure as a stadium. In Buea it would not be very difficult for a supporter to walk onto the field during a match but in the villages it would be easy to do so.

Cameroonians even have a term for animals or spectators who cross the field while teams are playing a match. Since no one is allowed on the field but the 22 players, animals such as chickens, goats and cows or even human beings that appear on the field are called foreign bodies. The official rule is that the referee has to stop the match for as long as the foreign body is on the pitch. In the case of animals, it can hardly be said that they are trying to influence the match. In the case of supporters though, this becomes a different story. I heard cases of village matches where supporters ran onto the field to stop the ball. A second-division player told me about a match where rainfall had turned the pitch into a muddy pool of water. When one attacker shot the ball at the goal, it dropped dead in a puddle of water just in front of the goal line. A supporter from the opposing team rushed onto the field and kicked the ball away. The referee awarded neither a goal nor a penalty.

The lack of fences and brick walls in the villages is made worse by a lack of security personnel. While there are maybe up to thirty policemen or soldiers present at first-division matches, the level of security in the second and third divisions can be classified as ‘minimal’ to ‘completely absent’. We already know that the security personnel are paid for out of ticket revenues. Village matches certainly attract impressive numbers of spectators but the fact remains that the stadiums in the larger towns are capable of hosting far more spectators. It would, therefore, be logical to assume that there is simply not enough money to cover the costs of having many policemen and soldiers to oversee village matches.

In summary, spectators can influence the match in several ways. First, sup- porters sometimes go onto the field during official game time and influence the match by obstructing players of the opposing team or by kicking the match ball away. I cannot say that I have witnessed any of this happening during first-divi- sion matches. Second, supporters can spoil the match by bursting the match balls. Third, supporters can (threaten to) beat up the visiting team, so the players go onto the field with trepidation. The visiting team knows that if they win the

match, they are likely to be molested by the crowd. If they lose the match, they will probably be left alone. Ashu told me that some of the Buea Boys players had even asked the coach to be left out of the line-up during their three village matches. In short, supporters can influence the outcome of a match – sometimes doing so through the use of latent or real violence.