There is a romance in local football circles that will forever link Jomo Sono to Orlando Pirates. He is arguably the Soweto club’s favourite son of all time.
This sentimentality was again at the fore when Sono’s team, Jomo Cosmos, beat Kaizer Chiefs 2-0 in the Coca-Cola Cup quarterfinals, thus, in the minds of some, ”avenged” Pirates’ league loss by the same scoreline against Chiefs a week earlier.
For the umpteenth time, the Pirates fraternity could count on the Black Prince to bring them back from woe. This time he did not even have to do it wearing the number 10 shirt Pirates have shelved until they find a player suitable enough to wear ”Jomo’s jersey”.
Sono comes from a ”Pirates family” — his father Eric ”Scara” was a Bucs legend and his brother Julius ”KK” a flawed genius, who in the family tradition brought lots of joy to those who swear by the famous skull-and-crossbones sign.
All this will count for naught during the Coca-Cola Cup semifinal clash between Cosmos and Pirates at the Royal Bafokeng stadium in Rustenburg on Sunday.
Whatever feeling one may have for the Sonos at Pirates affair, the Coke Cup fixtures demand that one team will suffer the heartbreak of defeat.
Unlike the fans, Sono does not wear his heart on his sleeve. When it comes to running a football club he is shrewd businessman intent on maximising earnings for his enterprise — even if it is at the cost of causing pain to the hordes that confer royal status on his family.
An example of this lack of sentimentality came in the 1989 season, when Pirates needed a point from their last match to pip archrivals Chiefs to the league championship.
When everybody expected Cosmos to go easy, they walloped Pirates 5-1 and, even more treacherously, handed the title to Chiefs.
As Sono’s long-time partner at Cosmos, Roy Matthews, told the Mail & Guardian this week: ”When Jomo bought Highlands Park in 1983, all sentimentality regarding Pirates came to an end.”
Those in doubt should head this weekend to the North West village said to have the richest platinum reserves in the world.
Cosmos seek a continuation of the rich vein of form that has seen Sono move from being asked to fire the coach — himself — to being the October coach of the month.
Sono, who runs the club from his own pocket, needs the R2-million that comes with first prize more than his multi-sponsored adversaries. He would also like to underscore why he is the only manager in the last four who has actually won the Coke Cup.
He also shares with another semifinalist, Pitso Mosimane of Supersport United, the dubious honour of once being a bridesmaid to Kaizer Chiefs, who have won the cup three times in its five-year history with the Premier Soccer League.
Supersport United take on Ajax Cape Town in the other semifinal in Kimberley on Saturday.
Pirates are desperate for a trophy. It has been five years since the Buccaneers won a cup — and even then it was the Top 8 title, which requires a club to win a mere three matches to be champs.
Pirates need the Coke Cup to appease the fans still smarting from the loss to Chiefs last month. They need cup glory to exorcise the ghosts of narrowly missing out of the league title they were so close to last season.
Kosta Papic is probably their most popular coach since Russian Viktor Bondarenko. If he leads the side to its first real final in half a decade, and even better, wins the cup, he would upstage Bondas in the sentimentality stakes.
The Sono and Pirates family albums probably have lots of pictures of happy moments together.
But one of the reasons Sono left Pirates was that his old club was not too interested in treating club football as a business, where professionalism and a business ethos ruled the roost.
In that world, sentiment and old romance counts for nothing.