Andrew Muchineripi Soccer
Kaizer Chiefs and success were once synonymous. No South African season passed without the Amakhosi winning the national championship or at least one of the major knockout competitions.
They were a great club, filling grounds throughout the country with a heady brew of attacking football. Ace Ntsoelengoe, Teenage Dladla, Fani Madida, Shane MacGregor and Doctor Khumalo were just some of the stars who wore the black and gold.
How times have changed. Chiefs last experienced glory in 1994 when they defeated Sundowns in a thrilling, five-goal BP Top 8 decider. Fans who once took success for granted have been on a seemingly never-ending starvation diet.
Coaches come and go, players come and go, but the league title and the lucrative cups continue to elude the first club to represent South Africa in the African Champions Cup (recently renamed the African Champions League.)
Jeff Butler, a proud, shrewd, fiftysomething Englishman who guided Chiefs to more trophies than any other coach, vacated the hot seat last season, claiming the stress was endangering his health. Wellington Manyathi, once the darlin of the Amakhosi stands, took over and battled from the start.
Despite a top-of-the-table victory over Manning Rangers, the Durban club emerged convincing winners of the inaugural Castle Premiership.
Making matters worse was the failure to defeat traditional arch-rivals Orlando Pirates in three clashes with a 4-1 mauling by the Buccaneers in the Bob Save Super Bowl semi-finals particularly difficult to swallow. Jerry Sikhosana inspired the remarkably one-sided triumph with a hat- trick and also scored the winner in the first league showdown and the last-gasp equaliser in the return match.
Paul Dolezar is the latest coach charged with the task of taking the Amakhosi back where they believe they belong. The top. But the diminutive native of Yugoslavia who was reared in France quickly discovered that the road to the summit is treacherous.
Newly promoted African Wanderers struck three goals past Brian Baloyi in a drawn league opener and then the Ian Wright of South African football, Cape Town Spurs striker Ian Gorowa, scored twice in a convincing home triumph.
Victories over Amazulu and Bloemfontein Celtic enabled Dolezar to temporarily abandon his worry beads only for Bush Bucks to arrive from Umtata sans star striker Wilfred Mugeyi and still collect maximum points.
After five rounds, the Amakhosi lie 10th, six points behind Rangers, who are proving anything but the one-season wonders many observers suggested they were. The fact that Pirates are just one place above Chiefs offers only a warped form of consolation.
Chiefs took a break from league action last weekend to face Celtic in the Rothmans Cup, a new knockout competition offering a staggering R1,1-million to the winners of an event in which each round is staged over two legs except the final.
The word in the streets was that failure to overcome Celtic after a drawn first leg in Bloemfontein would spell au revoir for Dolezar, who coached in his adopted home before working in Morocco, Gabon and the Middle East.
It is an indication of the seriousness of the situation that the coach who expands more energy than some of his players during a match while pacing the touchline, treated the 2-0 victory as if they had won the cup rather than cleared the first hurdle.
This is the beginning of great things, proclaimed Monsieur Dolezar, who introduced a host of new signings this week and then supervised a clearout that made the French revolution look like a Sandton tea party.
The moustachioed coach is pining his hopes on Nigerian defender Muisi Ajoa, midfielders Bradley Carnell and Marcus Mphafudi and strikers Marc Batchelor and Zimbabwean Liberty Musonda.
Ajoa was first into action and judgment must be reserved as Celtic offered less aggression than a poodle on tranquilisers, yet were in contention until Mark Williams scored three minutes before the final whistle.
Chiefs now face a searching programme of Premiership matches at Santos, Jomo Cosmos and Moroka Swallows and these encounters will better indicate whether Dolezar can escape from the lengthy shadow of the guillotine.
He has already boasted that the league title is returning to Chiefs for the first time since 1993. Dutch coach Clemens Westerhof made a similar claim when he joined Sundowns and his failure to deliver triggered his demise.
CAPTION: Walking a tightrope: New coach Paul Dolezar will have to find a winning formula quickly to satisfy the fanatical Chiefs fans.