Football
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Pirates, Chiefs prepare for Soweto Derby with a twist

South Africa's two traditional giants Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs clash in a pre-season friendly with a twist on Saturday, a made-for-profit event aimed at growing their brands called the Carling Black Label Champion Cup.

It is a match that is unique in world football, dreamed up by clever marketers, which provides their pair with a strenuous work-out ahead of the new campaign that probably neither, in a perfect world, would choose.

It will be played at a sold FNB Stadium in Soweto, with an expected crowd in the region of 80,000 and millions more watching at home, which points to, from a commercial point of view at least, it's tremendous success.

The premise of the game is that supporters from either side have spent the last three months voting for the starting line-ups of their team, putting the power of selection in their hands.

The event has been staged annually since 2011 and in that time there have been few surprises in this regard, supporters en masse have never opted to throw in a promising youngster, while new signings usually arrive on the scene too late to get the required number of votes.

So the teams shape up pretty much as the coaches would have, with the tried and trusted, so from that point of view there is little to enthuse over.

Organisers have tried to spice things up by adding the ability of fans to select their formations as well - time will tell whether that addition is successful or not.

In the early years of the event, supporters could also select an individual to be withdrawn after 60 minutes as well, but this proved a little tough on the fragile psyche of the players and instead they now get to choose a player to come off the bench instead, with team coach deciding who will be withdrawn.

Organisers must be applauded for dreaming up the concept, and the response from supporters in a country where the brands of Chiefs and Pirates reign supreme, even in times when they are far from kings on the pitch, had consistently been enthusiastic.

Carling Black Label, a popular beer brand, have cashed in on the potential of the brands of the two sides, and while for the teams there is a big cash incentive to play, even if neither coach would choose such a high-profile fixture at what is a challenging time of pre-season.

The match has traditionally come a week before the start of the season, but this year will be played a fortnight before the MTN8 quarterfinals, for which Chiefs and qualified and Pirates not.

It might be pre-season, but that does not mean that fans expect anything less than a victory in what remains one of the biggest derbies in the world in terms of interest and popularity at least.

The match comes a little over a month after Pirates played their last fixture, taking a 4-1 hammering in the Nedbank Cup final against SuperSport United on June 24.

Their players then went on a close-season break and are now very early in their pre-season preparations, so the risk of injury is high, and overall fitness levels and match sharpness will likely be low.

In a game where they will expect to keep their intensity high, that will present a challenge.

It is therefore advantage Chiefs, who trail in the head-to-head in the last six meetings with two wins to the four of Pirates, though all of the latter's successes have come via penalty shoot-outs.

The Carling Black Label Champion Cup is a gimmick, but a clever one that is undeniably popular. It offers little football value, but an opportunity for fans of the two clubs, who make up the majority of soccer supporters in the country, a chance to get into the new season.

And it is also further proof that no matter how poor the two teams may be, and how far they have fallen behind the likes of Mamelodi Sundowns and Bidvest Wits in terms of quality, they remain a drawcard and a marketers dream.

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