What makes a great dugout duo?
The head coach largely gets all the plaudits, but often there is an individual beside them who has also contributed immensely to the success of the team. The relationship between head coach and their assistant can be a fraught one, or a budding partnership built on mutual respect and the desire to drive the team forward. KICK OFF’s Mark Gleeson looks at the elements that make this partnership work … or not.
The art of coaching has many recipes and like any dish, it can never be an exact production. Too many ingredients make it anything but a science and it is often, at best, more like calculated gambling.
But the role of coaches has evolved exponentially through the decades, moving from an era when teams played without a powerful personality on the sidelines, to a situation where sometimes the coach is bigger than the team.
Certainly, there have been no players who have called themselves “The Special One”.
Powerful managers have existed for the last 100 years from Arsenal’s legendary Herbert Chapman to Alberto Supicci, who won the first World Cup for Uruguay in 1930, and the modern incarnations like Sir Alex Ferguson, Rinus Michaels and this country’s most successful tactician, Pitso Mosimane.
In South Africa, coaches did not exist until well into the professional era, which began at the end of the 1950s, and then for decades thereafter were just on a part-time basis. Clive Barker drove taxis, Eddie Lewis sold insurance and Trott Moloto was a teacher.
Clubs and representative teams used to have a trainer, but he was there for the physical work, while selectors picked the team. They were usually committee men, some with very little knowledge of the game.
It could not be more different these days with coaches employing a multiple layer of assistants, analysis
and conditioning experts to help them achieve success.
The most important element of this is the assistant coach … the right-hand man.
But what makes a top assistant coach, what are the elements he must bring to ensure his boss wins game and they both get to keep their jobs?
Again, it is complicated and complex, and the formula varies from relationship to relationship. But increasingly demands of the modern game dictate that there is little margin for error and one man can no longer do all the work.
It is a collective effort to stay at the top, as witnessed by Mamelodi Sundowns and their complicated coaching structure.
The champions might have too complex a tapestry but there can be no arguing that it works. Titles and trophies do not lie.
Manqoba Mngqithi co-coaches with Rhulani Mokwena but has the final word in the case of a dispute. Steve Komphela backs them. It is Mngqithi’s second season at the helm and comes after seven years of playing back-up to Pitso Mosimane.
“If it had taken another two or three years to get the job, I wouldn’t have felt bad,” he tells KICK OFF. “Coming here has always been about learning, and about becoming a better coach.
“I can tell you with all the confidence in the world, I brought Steve! I am the one who went to Rhulani to say, ‘the assignment we have is very big and we need someone who has personality and experience to assist us and I think Steve is the right guy for the job’.
“Coach Rhulani asked, ‘you serious?’ I had met Steve on coaching courses but never worked with him but I was convinced, ‘he’s the right specimen’. Rulani said ‘if you think so, why not?’.”
“The game needs much more detail. Each facet of football has an impact on the next. All the time, you have to find the balance and you need people to help focus on all those details,” Mngqithi adds.
Different methods
The Sundowns formula might not work elsewhere, however: “Ideally, and this doesn’t always happen, but you should have a head coach who is in charge and then the man who is basically number two and there must be a good relationship between the two,” says Sergio dos Santos, one of the few coaches to have taken charge of both Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates.
“It must be solid as a rock; you can’t have to watch your back or worry about what is happening around you. You must have his backing, commitment, dedication and loyalty,” he says of the assistant coach.
Even, he adds, to the extent of the assistant being able to take over. “Say you’ve got the ‘flu or something like that and you cannot make the game, it is a guy who you know can take the reigns and lead from the front, just like you would.”
Often in South African football coaches arrive at clubs, or in the national team job, to find an assistant already in place. High profile foreign coaches in particular were asked to use a local as an assistant, almost as teaching project. Stuart Baxter is a good example of this.
Then there is also the nurse maid element. When Philippe Troussier was appointed by
“YOU CAN’T HAVE TO WATCH YOUR BACK OR WORRY ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING AROUND YOU.”
Chiefs in 1993, Kaizer Motaung asked Trott Moloto to come along and help guide the Frenchman, who was young and notably volatile but had much success already in west Africa
“I met a guy who was crazy, I had to manage him,” Moloto remembers with a hearty laugh. “Often, I had to stop him trying to punch a player. But most important was to try and protect the potential that the club had at that time with some many good players. I was the one they also went to with their concerns and complaints.”
Motaung had employed Moloto because of the role he played under Stanley ‘Screamer’Tshabalala in turning Sundowns in one of the country’s biggest clubs.
“I learnt to take care of so many aspects. Player welfare, preparing the field for training, being a sounding board. And when we won trophies it gave me a profile as well.”
Indeed, the assistant coach is no longer an anonymous item sitting to the side of the coach and many of them are seen as integral to the head coach success.
When Benni McCarthy took over at
AmaZulu last year, he insisted the club hire his old Cape Town City assistant Vasili Manousakis
“The energy that the head coach projects almost dictates what role he wants you to fulfil, or the role he is comfortable with. Benni is a winner, he wants to win at all costs. We share the same philosophy about how the game should be played. That makes things a whole lot easier,” says Manousakis.
But he says it is not a relationship of equals. “There is an imaginary line that I see, that I feel an assistant should never cross. You don’t need to act as, or try and be, the head coach. You need to fulfil and deliver the role as best you can, to support the coach.”
Support does not mean being a ‘yes man’: “With me and Benni it’s all about trust and honesty. I’m going to tell him my opinion and do it respectfully, and that’s what it is … it’s my honest opinion.
“I’m not there to agree with him and I think that’s what he wants. He doesn’t want a robot, someone who shadows him or picks up cones.”
But chemistry is also key as Manousakis found out under Jan-Olde Reikerink. “I was a little bit fortunate because Benni and I were both new at Cape Town City and we were, from the beginning, trying to find our feet together. That built the foundation.
“There was a lot of communication and dialogue, we had a lot of lunches and talked about how we viewed the game. From there we built up an amazing relationship and we trusted each other. We started together and we enjoyed victories together.
“It’s driven by the head coach, it’s his qualities and leadership. Benni has no i nsecurities about the people around him and a wants to be surrounded by the best analysists,a physios etc. But some other coachesc want to be in total control or theyt fear you are stepping over the line.
“That makes it difficult then for an assistanta coach and when you are not sures where you can tread, or you are not sures how your opinion is going to be received,r then you start to withdraw a l ittle bit and it is not healthy.
“And remember … the players see everything, e they notice everything, they t feel everything, they sense the environment.” e
No N egos
One of the newer combinations is GGavin Hunt with Ian Taylor, who worked uunder Eric Tinkler at Cape Town City, then wwent to coach youth football in China and l ast season was head coach of Cape Town SSpurs in the GladAfrica Championship.
Hunt asked Taylor to join him at his new v venture at Chippa and the new assistant kno knows he needs to make it work.
“Gavin is set in his ways and rightly so to because he is a successful coach. What he’s done has worked and I have to find out what it is that has made him so successful. He is so experienced in terms of setting out winning teams and winning games and it’s very exciting for me because I’ve never worked with someone like this before.
“He is very demanding in terms of attitude and desire and mentality. He is very clear in his way of doing things and the way he wants his team to play.”
Choosing the right assistant is paramount,” adds Mngqithi. “There are too many teams destroyed by the people working around it and the thing that would make us fail – believe me – is egos, selfishness and a lack of vision. People with selfish interests don’t see the bigger picture.
“You are never going to get anywhere when you worry about petty issues – ‘coach Manqoba is doing too many of the interviews or such trifles. Those things don’t put a medal around your neck.
“But if your focus is on the bigger picture you’ll succeed. The more we are selfless, the more we are not egocentric, the more we are not looking to be impressionists, the better our chances.
“What are you going to do with all the glory yourself, especially when you are working with very good people that know what they are doing?”
“AND REMEMBER … THE PLAYERS SEE EVERYTHING, THEY NOTICE EVERYTHING, THEY FEEL EVERYTHING, THEY SENSE THE ENVIRONMENT.”