Those who played soccer on township streets may remember the relatively rich boy lucky enough to own a plastic soccer ball.
This lad, usually wanting in ability, took his ball away while all were having fun because his side was losing and the other kids were constantly outsmarting him.
Sundowns boss and mining magnate Patrice Motsepe must have been such a boy when he was growing up in pioneering black businessman ABC Motsepe’s household.
As an adult, not only does he own the ball, but the entire club as well. And, just as it probably did when he was a kid, it upsets him terribly when his neighbours seem to get the better of him.
That is probably why he fired (or whatever the club spin doctors call the act) title-winning coaches Neil Tovey and Miguel Gammondi after six league matches and being knocked out by Supersport United in the Supa 8 competition. He replaced the duo with Gordon Igesund, the only coach to have led three different sides to the championship.
This was the latest in a series of decisions that prove that Motsepe should, at most, remain a benevolent benefactor with a hands-off approach to a club instead of embarrassing himself and the fans with his displays of childishness. He is bad for football.
Sundowns coaches are not given a chance to fail, let alone succeed, with the irritable Motsepe likely to jettison them faster than he probably dumps shares in a bear run on the JSE.
The billionaire has parted company with six coaches (albeit three sets of coaches or co-coaches/technical directors) since taking over Sundowns two years ago.
Motsepe fired Khabo Zondo and Oscar Fullone in January 2004. Their replacement, Paul Dolezar, was axed in December of the same year (with 18 months of his contract to run) and replaced by Fullone and Angel Cappa.
Fullone jumped ship early last year and Cappa was fired in December to allow for the Tovey-Gammondi show that had the league championship and charity trophies to show for its six-or-so months at the helm.
When he arrived at Sundowns, Motsepe promised to make the club a dominant force in Africa. To that end, he went on a spending binge, buying any player on offer.
As a result, players such as Zimbab-wean superstar Peter Ndlovu arrived amid much fanfare. They achieved little, with the former Coventry player spending more time nursing the wear and tear accumulated by playing in England than on the pitch for Sundowns. Ndlovu is paid more than R100 000 a month, while the average salary in the Premier Soccer League is less than R10 000.
Motsepe made no secret that he was raising the bar insofar as players’ salaries were concerned. Nothing wrong there — except when you distort the market so badly that there is always a risk that whatever sum other clubs can offer for a player, Motsepe can add a zero to that figure.
Another of Motsepe’s oddities is that, although he has no demonstrable knowledge of the finer aspects of the game, he seems to believe that pouring so much money into the club somehow qualifies him to have half-time ”pep talks” with the players.
The result has been that the players have become paranoid about losing.
Sundowns players signed on the basis of their ability to express themselves on the pitch now fear putting a foot wrong lest they upset the boss. They did both in Gammondi-Tovey’s last game, which they drew 0-0 with Bloemfontein Celtic.
One could understand if, say, Kaizer Motaung entered the Chiefs dressing room of his misfiring side as regularly as Motsepe does, given that Motaung has played and coached at the high level.
But as all good club bosses know, interfering with the coach is sowing the seeds of disaster.
By choosing Igesund as coach, Motsepe betrays his ignorance of the game and, even more importantly, the club’s traditional style of play.
By merely concentrating on the fact that Igesund has a hat-trick of league titles, Motsepe ignored that all three wins were not pretty.
His choice suggests that he either thinks Sundowns are called the Brazilians purely because of the colour of their strip, or he has never paid attention to teams coached by the former Durban City and Highlands Park striker.
Sundowns fans and non-fans have come to associate the club with a swagger and confidence that is never the hallmark of Igesund’s teams. He may very well win the championship, but it is doubtful if the true Brazilian fan would be proud of the way it was achieved.
Igesund has always claimed two defences for his unattractive approach. One is that he has had to work with talent at his disposal and, secondly, that that there is no room for commentary on the scoreboard.
This weekend’s match between Sundowns and Chiefs at the FNB stadium should give Igesund an opportunity of registering his first win against Chiefs as a coach. For Motsepe it may very well prove that money cannot buy everything.
Seeing that Motsepe seems to have got carried away by the local media’s likening him to the Chelsea owner, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, maybe counsel from that club’s coach, Jose Mourinho, could do him some good:
”If Roman Abramovich helped me out in training we would be bottom of the league and if I had to work in his world of big business, we would be bankrupt!”