Professor Jannie Hugo spoke in plenary at the 17th National Family Practitioners Conference in Pretoria, South Africa. He used the analogy of a soccer game and emphasised that we move away from just defending ourselves from goals by the enemy of disease but to play an attacking game by empowering our centre-forwards, community health workers, to get out into community and scoring goals of prevention. He stressed community oriented primary care (COPC) as the ideal model for delivery of primary care in the era of national health insurance in South Africa.