Tears in KZN, will it be the same in Ghana?

There will be tears at at least one sporting event over the next 48 hours, but many are predicting there will be plenty of crying at two venues thousands of kilometres apart.

I am referring, of course, Thursday's crunch match in Tamale in Ghana where Bafana face their moment of truth when they play Senegal in a vital Group D match which will decide whether they make the quarterfinals of the African Cup of Nations or take an early flight back to South Africa, leaving a nation in tears back home.

But, back to that scenario later. Friday night at Kingsmead, around about 6pm, there definitely will be a fair dose of emotion when Shaun Pollock takes part in a special presentation during the supper break of the ODI match between the Proteas and the West Indies.

Officials plan to have the whole of Pollock's family on the famous Kingsmead turf to say their final farewells in the penultimate step of the Polly Parade which has shown just how much he is loved among cricket fans around the country and many parts of the world.

What a pity that this is not the final ODI of the series there is one more match to come because Polly would no doubt have liked to have bowed out at his home ground.

Nevertheless, Friday's farewell game is bound to take on an added significance. The series has already been won and the West Indies have been hugely disappointing.

The only reason I, and I suspect many others, will be there is to say to our grandchildren one day that we were there when Polly played for South Africa in Durban for the last time.

Illustrious

His final two matches bring down the curtain to an illustrious career which has been well documented in every newspaper in the country and on Friday the Daily News is devoting its whole back page to Pollock, with tributes pouring in from all around the world.

He has served the game with distinction and you would be hard pressed to find any of his teammates or opposing players to say anything negative about his contribution to the sport.

With a better weather report than earlier in the week and with still a few tickets left on the east stand, let's urge all cricket lovers to come to Kingsmead Friday night to say goodbye to our own legend.

So tears there will be at Kingsmead, which brings us back to Bafana and Thursday's game. The permutations are quite simple, with Bafana having to beat Senegal by two goals and then hoping Tunisia beat Angola. A draw between these latter two teams will see Bafana heading for the airport along with Senegal.

So what is the betting? Bafana looked OK and then shared the points in their first game thanks to a late strike, but in the game against Tunisia they looked awful, with coach Carlos Alberto Parreira making strange team selections with several players out of position and struggling in both defence and attack.

Our man on the spot, Matshelane Mamabolo, seems to have put his finger on matters when he wrote that while this crunch match looms, the coach who earns R1,8-million a month seems impervious to the situation and is not adopting a hands-on approach to the team. It seems he is not even bothered about talking to the press.

Previous coaches have been hounded out of town and persecuted in the press for bad results, but Parreira seems to have escaped that.

Thursday could change all that - a victory and passage to the quarterfinals and he will instantly be hailed the new Messiah. But a loss and exit could have the vultures circling over the Bafana carcass.

What's is going to be, tears or smiles. We'll know the answer about 9pm on Thursday.