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| Lurking: Igesund and De Sa |
There is only one place to be this weekend. The Moses Mabhida Stadium on Saturday hosts the MTN8 final between unbeaten Kaizer
Chiefs and resurgent arch-rivals Orlando Pirates. Stuart Baxter v VV will dominate the week for
South Africa’s football-speaking majority.
To dare to predict the outcome of a game which sold out on
Computicket in the space of for hours would be difficult, not to say deceptive…
even dangerous. The AmaKhosi have played nine games this season, six in the
PSL, and they’ve wwwwwwwwwwon them all. BuccaBucca fans will point out they are
heading for a FIFTH successive cup final, an achievement as statistically improbable
as it is laudable.
There will be 56,000 in Durban on Saturday enthusiastically
pointing out the Forever Fearless revival of Reneilwe Letsholonyane or the Once
Always option of starting with Kermit Erasmus or Lehlohonolo Majoro.
Me? I’m colour blind. Black and Gold? Black and White? It’s
all the same to me, especially when your soft spot for rock-bottom AmaZulu
leaves you feeling green about the gills.
More importantly perhaps, as Chiefs and Pirates take a week
off league action for the R8m on offer from MTN, is what’s bubbling quietly
beneath them in the PSL.
Obviously Gavin Hunt’s big spending Bidvest Wits and Pitso
Mosimane’s champions Mamelodi Sundowns will enjoy their time off (Wits restart
the PSL action on the 26th against AmaZulu) before resuming the
battle for the title that REALLY matters.
But I am here to warn of two quiet revolutions going on in
South African football. One involves the sheer youthful exuberance of Roger de
Sa at Ajax Cape Town. The other, the hard-bitten, silver-lined experience of
Gordon Igesund at SuperSport United.
On Saturday, former Pirates boss De Sa, with 19 academy
graduates in his 23-man squad, kept his side unbeaten in second place, four
points behind Chiefs, with a 2-1 win over Bloemfontein Celtic.
Did he boast about it? Did he roar a warning to the big
guns? No, De Sa simply said: “If we are going to be serious League challengers
then we have got to score that third and fourth goal and we need to learn to do
that."
It was De Sa who got Pirates to their first THREE Cup
finals, including the big one, the African Champions League. Now surrounded by
the young and impressionable rather than the over-paid and sinister, he chides: "We
gave away a silly goal. Bad defending and bad goalkeeping didn’t help. We
should have killed them off.”
A lot further down the table lies the other threat to the
big guns. The return of Bafana Bafana coach Gordon Igesund was always going to
be interesting. After an uncomfortable two years in charge of the national
squad, he returns to his real speciality: winning PSL titles.
As the only man to do exactly that with FOUR different clubs, Igesund settled in to Cavin Johnson’s hot-seat at SuperSport United and
immediately inspired a 3-1 win over Platinum Stars to keep the club out of the
relegation zone after a difficult start.
Igesund purred: "All national coaches start out in club
football. I’m just thrilled to be back. You miss the day to day running of the
club; every morning you wake up and get excited about going to training.
“With the national team you have to get your players three
days before a game; they come in from overseas, and you have to do a lot of
work and then go and play. Now, I’m back to working daily with my players and
building relationships.
"I am loving it, and I’m so excited to be back. They
had no confidence, and they were demoralized after having played 5 games and
only one win. You have to pick them up and lift their spirits, and that's how I
felt when I got here.”
“We will get better as we go along. It’s only one win for
us; we need to go forward now and try to pick up as many points as we can.”
Stuart Baxter and Vladimir Vermecovic will dominate the
week. Mosimane and Hunt will gain a mention. But if we’re not talking about De
Sa and Igesund by the end of the season, I’d be surprised.
SOCCERBALLZ! my innovative football show on www.ballz.co.za with Mark Fish airs every Thursday from 9am-11am. See Ballz' Youtube channel for our growing library of fascinating football interviews with the big names.
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