Who are Pirates’ top scorers?
Inspired by the publicity of Pele scoring 1,000 goals, the Sowetan newspaper’s imaginative football scribe Fanyana Shiburi, in the early 1980s, authored a preposterous story claiming Jomo Sono was also on the brink of his 1000th goal.
But it was such a far-fetched invention that the claim very quickly disappeared from the newspaper’s pages and no more was made of the alleged feat.
For all their success over the last 50 years of professional football, Pirates have never really had a goal scoring great. Sono’s tally of goals is not known because record-keeping did not exist in the early NPSL days but it is unlikely to have reached three figures, never mind four.
The truth of the matter is Sono spent so much time away from Pirates because most of the year he was playing in the North American league that he never got a chance to amass a considerable goal tally in Bucs’ colours.
The club’s record goal scorer in the NSL era, i.e. post 1985, is actually a midfielder, Benedict Vilakazi, with 58. Over the last decade, top of the list of cumulative goal scorers is Thembinkosi Lorch with 29, evidence of how Pirates are a club who are still to produce a striker of legendary status.
The late Lesley Manyathela might have been heading to that status before his premature death in 2003. He had scored 31 goals in 63 starts for Pirates in all competitions before being killed in a car crash one month shy of his 22nd birthday.
The other factor is that players who amass a large total of goals for Pirates generally then seek a route to Europe, so they are not around long enough to get anywhere near three figures.