AFRICAN CHAMPIONS LEAGUE
Recipe for a vegetarian lion mix in African Champions League campaign
Mamelodi Sundowns are up against a team with a delightfully contradictory name and bizarre history when their African Champions League campaign begins on Wednesday. The Premiership winners take on Leones Vegetarianos in the Equatorial Guinea capital of Malabo in the first leg of their first-round tie. The idea of a lion being a vegetarian is absurd, but just as odd is the history of the club‚ whose founder was a Spanish traveller whose desire to set up football structures in out-of-the-way places was matched by his passion to spread a vegetarian way of life. Juan Manuel Rojas from Spain, Granada claims to have taken his coaching badge alongside 2010 World Cup-winning coach Vicente del Bosque and devoted a large part of his life to teaching the game to kids and adults. Rojas travelled to Equatorial Guinea‚ setting up in mid-2000 a club in Malabo, which he first called the Vegetarians. This was with the support of an NGO promoting vegetarianism in a strange example of using football t...
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