The Carlos Corner

Will Micho Sredojevic be a saviour for Orlando Pirates?

We can safely assert that Pirates circa now and the White House circa now share a chaotic organisational culture, in which progress and effective decisionmaking are hobbled by internecine rivalries. In such an environment, your theoretical job description is never your real job description. Other people, whether they sit below you or above you in the hierarchy, want to do your job, and are trying their damnedest to do so against your will. As Jonevret put it in an interview on Swedish TV: “The working conditions are very special in the club. You are not very involved‚ and that’s frustrating.”

So does new Pirates coach

Milutin “Micho” Sredojevic have the will and the guile to survive and thrive in the labyrinth of Bucs palace politics? His CV suggests he might: you don’t succeed in a series of East African leagues and national sides without a stock of political skill. Unlike Jonevret, whose prior coaching experience was exclusively in the boringly safe space of Scandinavian football, where everything is done by the book, the Serbian will be ready for blurred lines and murky power balances. And in his first brief tenure at the club, he showed grit and skill by taking Bucs to the semis of the African Champions League. But he confronts a very different PSL to the PSL of 2006. Both the Soweto giants are now in humiliating retreat – partly due to the fact that they no longer boss the transfer market, and partly due to the fact that neither club is matching the sustained coaching stability on display at Mamelodi Sundowns and Bidvest Wits. Both Pitso Mosimane and Gavin Hunt have been given money to spend – but they’ve also been given time, trust, support and autonomy. Both have delivered handsome returns on those non-financial investments. In defence of Kaizer Motaung, he has always understood the power of being patient and respecting a coach’s expertise. He is showing Patience with a capital P to Steve Komphela. At times in the past he may even have been a little too patient: both Ernst Middendorp and Vladimir Vermezovic were given more time to find their rhythm than they arguably deserved. But during Amakhosi’s most glorious eras in the PSL era, under Ted Dumitru and Stuart Baxter, those two coaches thrived because they were backed.

Of course the tenure of a

coach is often a chicken-andegg situation: in the PSL, and indeed all over the world, a coach earns a longer spell – plus a free hand on signings, selections and tactics – by winning silverware early. You can’t stick with a losing prospect indefinitely. But there has to be something seriously amiss when a club employs 12 coaches in a decade – as Pirates have done since 2007. Of those 12, only Ruud Krol went past two full seasons (he lasted three full seasons, enjoying great success while stoically tolerating constant interference in selection and signings). Only Roger de Sa (who resigned) and Eric Tinkler (who was replaced) served for longer than one full season.

Part of the problem is that

Khoza (like most other PSL bosses) tends to hire his coaches in a hurry, when he’s desperate for a fix, which means the target’s chief selling points are usually (a) that he’s available and (b) that he knows the PSL battlefield, even if his record is patchy. Enter the “devil-youknow” characters like Muhsin Ertugral and Vermezovic. When Khoza hired them, he hoped that their weaknesses would recede and their strengths would come to the fore. But it hardly ever works like that. This kind of hit-andhope hiring policy used to be standard practice in the English Premiership – patently limited coaches like Sam Allardyce, Mick McCarthy, Mark Hughes and Steve Bruce kept getting new gigs, and kept delivering predictably mediocre results. But nowadays, mid-table Premiership clubs are aiming higher – spending their ample broadcast millions on esteemed or rising managers from the continent. In a sense, Khoza has opted for a similar strategy in recruiting Sredojevic: he has a proven record in Africa, and he is not a proven failure in South Africa. It may or may not be relevant here that Micho clearly has the inclination to embrace the community he works in, as demonstrated by those amusing photos of him boogying with various buxom belles of Kampala during his stint with the Uganda national side.

Of course, rocking a Kampala

or Joburg dancefloor is a lot easier than guiding Bucs back from the abyss of mid-table mediocrity. Micho is calm, likeable, seasoned and his sides usually play positive, intelligent football. Is he the man to restore real power and stability to a chronically shaky office? The sensible bet is no. On the face of it, what Khoza needed was a strong-willed heavyweight, someone like Mosimane or Hunt, with the requisite record and force of personality.