Wentworth: The Beautiful Game & the Making of Place by Desai, A

ISBN 9781869144463

Publisher: UKZN Press 2019

256 pages

Soft cover

In the early 1960s, the city of Durban consolidated racially circumscribed group areas with brutal intensity. In the tiny enclave of Wentworth, designated a Coloured area, newly relocated residents made their homes and sought work in the numerous heavy industries that proliferated on its edges. As people built places of worship and newborn friendships reached across fences and staircases, soccer became the game of choice. Rudimentary pitches were marked out, cool drinks staked and the game unfolded with a mixture of delicate touches and bruising tackles. By the early 1970s, Wentworth’s ability to spawn soccer talent, headlined by the glamorous Leeds United, grew into the stuff of legend.