Football connoisseurs may remember Good Friday of 1985 as the day one of South Africa’s best talents was unveiled.
Pitso Mosimane, a youngster recently recruited from amateur team Rockville Hungry Lions, burst into the Vosloorus stadium wearing the colours of Jomo Cosmos to score a memorable hat-trick against Kaizer Chiefs.
The upshot of that performance was that Chiefs fans caused a mini-riot, smashing the windscreen of coach Joe Frickleton’s car, thus ending a schizophrenic year for the club. Chiefs had won all that was on offer the previous season, but also played the worst football in their 25-year history.
Fast forward to 2005. Mosimane takes on his former mentor, Jomo Sono, in the Coca-Cola Cup final in Polokwane on Saturday. (One hopes that ”take on” will have its normal football meaning, given Mosimane’s recent punch-up with Sundowns coach Angel Cappa.)
Mosimane’s rise as a coach — Saturday is his club’s fifth final in a row — proves that the man nicknamed Jingles is Sono’s most successful protégé on the field and on the touchline.
While players such as Phil Masinga, August Makalakalane and William Zondi were undoubted talents, none of them shone off the pitch as Mosimane has.
But it would be shortsighted to look at the match just as an encounter between master and student. If anything, it comes closer to a reunion on the bench.
Mosimane’s assistant, Thomas Madigage, signed for Cosmos as a 14-year-old and for a long time lived at Sono’s house while he finished high school and played for Cosmos.
United team manager Webster ”City Late” Lichaba left Pirates, where he was captain, to team up with Sono at the newly established Cosmos.
In football, however, the glory and disgrace always falls on the head coach. So Sono versus Mosimane it will be in the cauldron of Polokwane’s Peter Mokaba stadium.
Sono will want to show the little upstart — who has on occasion not shown proper respect for one of South Africa’s greatest footballers — who is the man.
Mosimane, for his part, will attempt to show why he is regarded as South Africa’s most talented homebred coach and one of the best in the trade, regardless of the passport they hold.
It does not help that Mosimane has on occasion been ungracious in defeat at the hands of Cosmos and insufferable when getting the better of his former master.
Mosimane, the incoming Bafana Bafana assistant coach, played under a variety of coaches both here and in Europe and has developed a style for Supersport that is too complex to pigeonhole.
One thing he seems to have taken from his days at Cosmos is an eye for spotting young talent. Daine Klaite and Sibusiso Mahlangu are just two of the youngsters the pay-channel-owned team has discovered.
Sono, on the other hand, seems to have abandoned his famous youth policy, which saw the club discover the likes of Mosimane himself, Blackburn Rovers’ Aaron Mokoena, Mark Fish and, more recently, Katlego Mphela — who starred for Racing Strasbourg in France before being loaned out to Supersport United.
And there is the small matter of one Jeremiah Jabu Pule. In deference to journalist Barbara Walters, who said: ”The sports page records people’s accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing but man’s failures,” I won’t go into the details of Pule’s latest escapade.
Cosmos may pretend that Pule’s disappearance does not change anything. But they, of all people, will do well to remember how he turned what was meant to be a traditional tight cup shoot-out into a one-man show. While playing for Chiefs in the 2001 final, Pule ran rings around a Cosmos side that must have been happy to hear the referee’s final whistle with the score at 5-0.
The Coca-Cola Cup has enjoyed a fantastic run and it is a pity that drinks with a stronger kick have robbed the final of such a talent.