Coaches I’ve worked with: We don’t value ourselves enough

South Africa is blessed with a number of top-quality coaches and they’ve really done well to improve our football. We don’t seem to acknowledge or utilise these talents enough in our football, like it is happening in other sporting codes. I am very pleased to pay tribute to a legendary coaching figure like Gordon Igesund and give him his flowers while he can still smell them. This man has achieved so much in football, and I strongly believe he has surpassed expectations. Not many would have placed a bet on him winning the league four times and the number of other trophies he has collected over the years. What an amazing human being he is. If you were to look at his journey, you will realise that he deserves a lot of praises and acknowledgement for his impact, influence and accolades. There are so many great players that have come through his hands and they went on to become household names. Some of them are even coaching and doing well, which is testament to this man’s impact in our football. He gave a lot of players a chance and there were even players that he met at a later stage of their careers, players who went off the rails, but he was there to play an important role in helping them back on a straight and narrow. This is one coach I want to celebrate this week because he deserves it. He has done so much, quietly, and his achievements speak for themselves. Talented as he is, this man has always been a humble servant of the game. I’ve never heard this man boasting about his achievements or playing big. He’s such a down-to-earth coach and I believe we should be making use of people like him. Our football is going through a crisis and we have answers to the questions we are faced with. I mean, how do we get our football back to where it belongs if we ignore some of the people who played an important role in taking us up to the top? It just doesn’t make sense to me! If these guys continue to be ignored, we are losing out on all the experience and expertise they have. Without disrespecting anyone, I believe the powers-that-be should seriously consider getting these coaches back into the system. It would be nice to have all the coaches to be acknowledged because there is no football without them. We should embrace our coaches and show them love. Gordon disappeared, quietly, from the professional football space and he is now focusing his energy on a different, but equally important, level. He is running his coaching academy and that means he is not lost to football. He is nurturing the future stars, and can you imagine what a difference he could be making in our football, given an opportunity? He decided to go and do what the country should be doing – looking after our youth and future stars. By opening an academy, this is coach Gordon’s way of showing that he is ready to mould future stars and help wherever he is needed, because he is still passionate about the Beautiful Game. Gordon is one of the coaches that should be our satellite coaches and even sit in the board meetings where decisions are made on how to take our football forward. What more must this man do in order for him to be taken seriously and given a big role to play in our football? Yes, we want to see international experts coming into our shores, but we also need to see our own, as they know us better than anyone else, doing what needs to be done. We keep belittling ourselves and think the world will show us the respect that we don’t show ourselves. It doesn’t work like that, unfortunately. We should be taking international football by storm. Yes, when we hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup, everyone was talking about our football just like they did in 1996 during the Afcon but what has happened since then? We have the infrastructure, people who can drive this vehicle forward and players that can represent us at the highest level. We just need to get our act together. We just don’t have the necessary vision, which is so disappointing, because we are mostly about the now and not the future. We focus on politics more than serving the game that we claim to love. We focus on things that will never benefit our football. Can you imagine if the coaches who impacted our football over the years were given a chance to have a say on how to improve our game? For an example, if things were done accordingly, why would we have Mamelodi Sundowns players dominating the national team like they’ve been doing? In one of the games, they showed us what they do best at club level by carrying the national team on their shoulders, leading the way on how we should be playing the game. It is not just because of the national team identity that these players have been doing so well for Bafana. It is because of what happens at club level. They took that into the national team, and it has been working, especially at Afcon. The other players gelled into the system so easily because it has the South African football identity to it. I’m not taking anything away from coach Hugo Broos because he did a tremendous job on the team, without a doubt! All I’m trying to illustrate is the importance of keeping to your identity because no one could have coached that in a space of two weeks for their team to master it. You take years to become a team to beat. I mean, just recently, I saw Manchester City bringing their trophies to Cape Town to display them. Yes, they enjoy international support and we love them but would Sundowns be allowed to go and display their trophies in England, without any issues? It won’t happen because we, as Africans, don’t value ourselves enough. We don’t want the world to know who we are and we don’t believe in ourselves. Anything from Europe is worldclass and better than what we have, that’s our mentality. I have nothing against Man City or them bringing the trophies here but I’m just trying to highlight the lack of confidence we have in ourselves. Because of that, we even allow mediocrity to come here because we don’t have our people like coach Gordon monitoring our coaching. The CAF licence isn’t enough for one to go and coach in Europe but look at the Europeans that come to Africa without any CAF licence, for example. If we had people like Gordon, they would be going out there to create relationships with Europe and looking at ways to share the knowledge and experience. By so doing, there would be holding of hands between us and them, where we are seen as the same and on the same wavelength. Instead of learning from them to improve our skills, we simply adopt theirs and hope this works for us. Remember when Sundowns played Kaizer Chiefs and made 44 touches without Amakhosi touching the ball? Gordon was in charge of that Sundowns team, and you tell me if you don’t see the same characteristics in the current Sundowns team. That’s club identity for you. Today, we are still celebrating Sundowns’ style of play which started more than three decades ago. Different coaches have come and gone but the team’s identity remains. That shows the coaching department acquires only the coaches that are aligned to their identity, which is an area of improvement in our football. I take my hat off for coach Gordon, who is a very approachable and humble coach and a mentor.