Although he walked free in 1997, Bruce Grobbelaar cannot find an English club that will have him. Simon Kuper reports
`Bloody mist, eh?” says Bruce Grobbelaar, jumping out of his car just in time for training. “You can’t see a golf ball on the fairways.” Behind him Table Mountain is indeed shrouded in the stuff, and across the bay from the training ground Robben Island is barely visible either. For the former Liverpool keeper has landed up in Cape Town, where he now coaches the Seven Stars.
A Grobbelaar training session goes something like this: Grobbelaar spins a football on his finger, frowning in concentration, while the players stretch and run laps. Grobbelaar places a ball on an orange post and kicks it into the distance, while the players pass to one another.
Grobbelaar performs the kick-off for two five-a-side games simultaneously, by punting two balls out of his hands at the same time. Grobbelaar watches the five-a- sides, saying “Goal” when appropriate. When a shot goes high over the bar he says, “Boom!” At the end, Grobbelaar selects five players to run short sprints and do press- ups as punishments for unspecified sins.
“Whole team must run!” some players protest, but Grobbelaar ignores them. Twenty-five years ago, one recalls, he was a corporal in the Rhodesian army. “He’s still got a way to go as a coach,” one Seven Stars player concedes.
Afterwards Grobbelaar chucks me and two of his players in his car, drops them at the supermarket, and drives me into Cape Town for a night out. The city, he says, is one of the six best in the world, with Vancouver, Perth, London and Paris.
“The sixth one I have not been to yet,” he adds, lifting that trademark Zorro moustache for the trademark toothy grin beneath the trademark bald head. At 41, with only the merest hint of a beer belly, he is still unmistakably Bruce Grobbelaar and he is stopped in Cape Town all the time by Liverpool fans.
The drive into the city is an experience. While reversing at high speed, Grobbelaar can swing the car 13cm to his left and then immediately back again to save a side mirror. He can read street signs from nearly 90m. As we drive down the waterfront in the dark, he entertains himself counting the prostitutes: 33, he says. “If my eyesight fails, I don’t think I’d be half the man that I am.” He was a child prodigy at baseball and cricket too, better, he says, as a teenage wicketkeeper than David Houghton, who went on to a Test career with Zimbabwe.
We sit down to fish and lots of wine in the Dias Tavern, a Portuguese bar that is showing Tottenham beat Leeds. Grobbelaar would love to be managing an English side himself, living with his wife and daughters in Lymington, Hampshire. The problem, he says, is the damage he suffered from being tried on charges of throwing football matches.
Although he walked free in 1997 and is now suing The Sun, the newspaper that accused him, it has been hard to find an English club that will have him. “Your name has been tainted with the stigma,” he grumbles, emphasising every word like a true white Southern African.
And without any prompting, he recalls how the saga began, one day in November 1994, when he arrived at Heathrow to catch a plane to Zimbabwe and was confronted by two Sun journalists who told him they had videotapes of him purportedly telling his former business partner Chris Vincent about match-fixing.
This merely compounded Grobbelaar’s problems, because he knew that the News of the World was about to run a sex story about him. “I had given Vincent a false account of sexual allegations with other people,” he explains. He flew his wife and daughters to meet him in Zimbabwe, hoping to shield them from the sex story, but a lawyer told his wife about it on the aeroplane and at Harare airport she walked straight past him. Later that day he had to play a World Cup qualifier against Zaire. It was, he says, hard to motivate himself.
He is still not over the trial. Recently he dreamed that he was sitting in a cell and waiting again for the jury’s verdict, but this time, in the dream, he was found guilty. In real life, Grobbelaar, who had previously lost his money setting up a safari park with Vincent, lost more in the case, together, he believes, with a portion of his reputation.
He does not spend a lot of time worrying about this, chiefly because he had never expected to live to be 41. In the Rhodesian war, he explains, “you went out and survived that day. And the rest is bonus.” He fought the war against the black guerrillas who would later lead Zimbabwe. Is it not surprising, then, that he is now the most popular white man in the country.
In the war, because of his eyesight, Grobbelaar worked as a tracker, gauging when and where guerrillas had passed from the state of their footprints and food remains. It was a job normally done by black hunters.
When English clubs rejected him, he decided to start his coaching career in Zimbabwe. Last year he briefly acted as caretaker manager of the national team, sending himself on for the last 20 minutes of a game against Tunisia in November, and he spent months trying to negotiate a job as assistant coach.
But the Zimbabwean dollar kept plunging and in the end the country could not pay him enough. And as one official at the Zimbabwean Football Association asked me: “Born in Durban, grew up here, then went to Canada, spent 14 years at Liverpool – is he a local man?”
In fact, Grobbelaar is a local man in many places. He throws me into his car again and as we shoot down the highway, he points to the Cape Castle and says: “That’s where my grandfather was born. His father was a fusilier in the British Army, and the castle was a British stronghold in the Boer War.” The birth in the castle, Grobbelaar says, entitled him to a work permit when he joined Liverpool.
In June, Seven Stars is expected to merge with local rivals Spurs to form Ajax Cape Town, a feeder club of which Ajax Amsterdam will own 51%. Short term, therefore, Grobbelaar plans to win some matches with Seven Stars playing with a back four. Then, when the club is safe from relegation, he will start them playing the Ajax system with three defenders.
Next, become head coach of Ajax Cape Town. Then, back to Europe. And the ultimate goal? Grobbelaar is not a man for coyness: “My ambition is to take the reins at Liverpool.”