Orlando Pirates are about to win a treble and comparing them with La Liga’s Atlético Madrid is stretching metaphors, but it’s an analogy worth making.
Years ago Atlético were relegated to the second division. Most teams with tradition and pedigree expect to come up at the first attempt, but Atlético found the second tier rather too competitive. Afraid the team would lose supporters, they released adverts in which a father and son are engaged in a serious talk. “Daddy, why do we support el Atleti?” The father replies: “Some things just can’t be explained. But it’s something very, very big.” Before winning the MTN8 in December, it had been almost eight years since Pirates last won the league, in 2002, under Zimbabwean coach Roy Barreto.
Perhaps the Madrid analogy I allude to isn’t that strange. Imagine a Pirates fan born in 2000 who last witnessed — if infants have any recollection at all — the team lift a trophy in 2002. It’s conceivable to think of an 11-year-old fan who goes to matches every weekend wondering, in the presence of his father: “Daddy, why do we support Pirates?”
To put it in perspective, one has to look at the record of their main Soweto rival, Kaizer Chiefs. Since 2001 Amakhosi have won the league twice, in 2003/04 and 2004/05; the Telkom Knockout Cup six times; the Telkom Charity Cup and Nedbank Cup once apiece and several other “minor” trophies.
For Pirates, winning trophies isn’t enough. Former coach Gordon Igesund would attest to this quirkiness. He was considered anathema by a purist section of the team’s support base who disliked his pragmatic approach, known by some fans as skop, skiet en donner. It’s not much of an approach, really, involving lobbing the ball forward to a target man, preferably tall and good in the air, and hoping for the best. That Igesund won the 2000/01 league and the BP Cup didn’t prevent irate fans from hiring a minibus and visiting him at the team’s training ground where they beat him up.
This trait of Pirates’ fans reminds me of the fans of the Turkish club, Besiktas. Their chant, captured so eloquently by the New Yorker’s Elif Batuman, goes: “Besiktas is the most surreal team in the world. Fenerbahce and Galatasaray only care about winning, but Besiktas is essentially irrational and therefore essentially human.”
To be sure, winning is essential, but it cannot be the sole objective. Winning has to be done in style. Football must be played according to the tenets set out in a jogo bonito (Portuguese for beautiful football) manual, a text whose writing is overseen by the Brazilian, Hungarian and Dutch sides. Even though footballers have become workers since Big Money took an interest in the game, their brief also involves entertaining supporters. Fans should go home, a smile ready to flash on their faces at the memory of a nutmeg, a dummy and other trickery.
To be sure, Ruud Krol’s team isn’t a classic Pirates squad. This side doesn’t come close to the teams coached by, say, Russian coach Viktor Bondarenko or Serbian mentor Kostadin Papic. Krol’s side is a compromise, a mixture, in equal measure, of unpredictability, pragmatism, grit and some panache. The side went into the final match needing a victory. It was nerve-racking for me and for a couple of days my wrist was sore from banging on the table.
Almost a decade has gone by since Pirates last won the league, and the club’s support hasn’t grown as much as that of its rivals. This weekend Pirates could lift a third trophy, the Nedbank Cup. At the rate at which they are winning trophies, there won’t be the need for fathers to reply to that irritating question.