COACH BENNI

"I AM LEARNING IN EUROPE SO I CAN COME HOME"

Mzansi’s greatest player Benni McCarthy is now trying his hand as a coach, and tells Samindra Kunti in Belgium that he wants to help developelop South Africa’s next superstar. But the Bafana job is not an option … KICK OFF: How are you enjoying your job as an assistant coach at SintTruiden? BENNI: It’s an amazing experience, converting from player to coach. The work is a little different – first you have to make players understand the system you want to play and how you want them to play, then I use my playing experience to explain what they must do in a game situation. I find it’s a very good challenge. My knowledge of the game is getting much better – I am starting to understand things from both a coaching point of view and from when I used to play. You haven’t found the switch from player to coach difficult? At times I do, because I think what I would do in certain situations, but then forget that that’s not my job – that’s the players’ job and I have to try and make them understand things from the non-player side. Everyone I have spoken to that made the transition makes the same mistakes. It’s a part of it, and it is normal. Do you miss playing? Noooo, no, no, I don’t! I enjoyed my career, but it has come to an end. Age waits for no-one. It was time to pack it in and my new challenge is to try and equal or become a better coach than I was a player. The only thing I miss is the hours. As a player you arrive at the club at 9am, training starts at 10:30 and by 1pm you are home. As a coach you arrive at 7.30 or 8am and you leave at 5pm – that’s too long! What does your job entail and how do the players respond to what you do? As a player you do the physical and the tactical side, you play and that’s your job done. Coaches have to analyse videos, what we have done well, the mistakes we have made, if the system worked well, the interlinking and interchange between the players. We try to rectify mistakes to make the players better. We call them in and show them the mistakes we made. We also show them the good things we did, so that we can always take a positive from every game. We analyse our next opponents and break the game down in a way that we don’t bore the players with too much information – they only see the bits they need to see. From our side though, everything is very detailed. It is time-consuming and energy-consuming. These are the things you start to understand when you become a coach. You have wanted to do this for a long time … It keeps me in football – it’s the thing I love the most. I was fortunate to have had a nice and long career