/ 14 November 2008

Hope won’t win trophies

What to get for the billionaire football club owner who has everything? A coach who has won almost nothing.

That will do as an immediate assessment of Patrice Motsepe’s acquisition of Henri Michel as Mamelodi Sundowns’ mentor. Michel came, saw and was appointed — all in the space of a weekend that began on Halloween.

This week, looking every inch the frumpy Frenchman, an exhausted Michel lurched into the country to complete a journey that took him from Beirut to Dubai to Johannesburg. He celebrated his arrival by lighting up a cigarette.

The smoking laws aren’t the only hardships Michel will have to endure in South Africa.

However unfairly, his tenure at Chloorkop is sure to be tainted by the swirling suspicion that dogs European coaches who dare to dip their pale toes in the dark waters of the great African game.

For every beloved white dodderer — hello uncle Ted Dumitru — there lurks a despised charlatan, which may or may not have been the case with Philippe Troussier and sadly misunderstood figures such as Carlos Queiroz. Quite where the unmanageable madness of Muhsin Ertugral belongs on that scale has yet to be determined.

Welcome to the club, Mr Michel. Your membership has been fully paid up in the currency of anonymous distrust.

But there are cold, hard facts behind the frigid looks that Michel will endure on the unforgiving edge of the touchline.

Capped 58 times for France as a midfielder between 1969 and 1980, he began his coaching career with a bang when he took his country to Olympic gold in 1984 and to third place in the 1986 World Cup.

But the rest of Michel’s international endeavours read like a dentist’s report on a crystal meth addict. Cameroon, Morocco and Côte d’Ivoire were all first-round casualties at the World Cup with him in charge.

If that seems an unfair measure of Michel’s abilities, given the perennial paucity of Africa’s World Cup success, consider that he has also misguided Tunisia and Morocco to first-round exits at the Africa Cup of Nations.

Michel’s record with clubs littered around bits of Europe and Africa is scarcely less edifying. His golden years were 2003 and 2004 when he won the CAF Confederation Cup and the Champion du Maroc — the Moroccan league title — with Raja Casablanca. And that’s all, folks.

Then again, raja is the Arabic word for hope. Perhaps that’s what Motsepe reckons he is investing in.