Former Mamelodi Sundowns captain and the last skipper to raise a ‘Knockout’ trophy, Hlompho Kekana has shared his views on the R100k Man of the Match award that will be on offer for the Carling Knockout Cup matches.
Kekana was the captain when Downs won the Telkom Knockout in 2019, the last time the knockout tournament was played before Carling Black Label brought it back to life.
After an absence of three years, the tournament is back with a new sponsor and new innovations like the big prize for each game’s best player.
For Kekana, it is something amazing to see and he hopes it will inspire some brilliant moments in the games.
“I promise you there’ll be crazy stuff!” Kekana exclaimed.
“There’ll be craziness initiated in the game. I’d want to see a lot of people trying to score from outside of the box, just for a change, to give us a new vision of themselves because I’m sure a lot of them right now they’ll be like, ‘Wow if I play well in one match, I go home with 100,000!’
“That’s big money, so there’s more incentives. I’m sure players will want to make sure that they go home with so much.”
Kekana joked that when he won the Man of the Match in the last edition, he was rewarded with 5 GB of data, and photos of his prize and a few other odd Man of the Match awards from around the world trended back then.
“I won 5 GB and I broke the internet!” Kekana laughed.
“I remember in the UK, they posted one of my pictures with the data. And [pictures of] the rest of the guys around the world, I remember one that won a chicken, one won Adidas slippers and the other won a pizza.
“There were a lot of fun Man-of-the-Match pictures in that. And I remember I trended because of 5 GB of data.
“You could buy all those other awards and not even get close to R10,000. So you’ll have enough still after spending on the data, pizza, slippers and a lot of the other Man-of-the-Match gifts on the day.
“But what can we say? We’re excited about this new trophy and new sponsor in the league. I think we need more in football because our footballers I believe deserve more.”
You can read more about the Carling Knockout Cup and what Kekana thinks of the new tournament in this week’s edition of iDiski Times, free on the website.
