Pitso is our greatest export
At the end of last season, Pitso Mosimane could have sat in his office in Choorklop, sipped on a whisky, chugged on a cigar, and toasted to all he had done at Mamelodi Sundowns.
He could have then got down to the business of preparing Masandawana for another campaign in the Premier Soccer League and Caf Champions League, safe in the knowledge his legendary status at the Brazilians had long been secured.
After all, the president of Sundowns, Patrice Motsepe, had already said he wanted “Jingles” to be the Sir Alex Ferguson of Mamelodi Sundowns.
Ferguson, the most successful coach in the history of English football, spent 27 years at United, retiring having won 13 English Premier League titles, and two Uefa Champions League trophies, and plenty of other silverware to boot.
Mosimane had been at Sundowns since late in 2012, winning five league titles already, one Caf Champions League, and several other pieces of silverware to boot.
But Mosimane, as we now know, was finished at Sundowns, at least for now. Not content with sitting in a comfort zone, to use that vomit-worthy esoteric phrase, he decided to jet off to Cairo and take up a post with Egyptian giants Al-Ahly.
The mission was simple – Ahly hadn’t won the Caf Champions League, their bread and butter, for seven years.
Mosimane was tasked with changing that, even if he did have the advantage of joining at the semifinal stage after Swiss coach Rene Weiler had already got the Red Devils that far.
Still, it is one thing to have a mission assigned to you, it is another to deliver and on Friday night in Cairo, Mosimane delivered, winning himself a second Caf Champions League winner’s medal and Ahly their ninth title overall.
A two-legged semifinal against Wydad Casablanca was no gimme, but Ahly cruised past a side Sundowns had plenty of trouble with in many Champions League meetings.
Make no mistake, a 5-1 aggretate scoreline over two legs is a hammering of note.
Then it was the Cairo derby in the final against Zamalek, and if you could say a one-legged final gave Mosimane an advantage, in terms of one win, one trophy, you could equally say the odds in the other direction – one bad performance and the trophy was gone – were also in place.
Ahly had to show plenty of fight against their bitter rivals, with a wonder-goal from Shikabala threatening to deliver the trophy to the White Knights, after Ahly had got themselves an early lead. But it was Ahly who found a late winner, with a splendid strike from Ashfa Magdy.
Maybe it was Ahly’s superior fitness that told, with Kabelo Rangoaga’s skills in that department well-known from his time at Sundowns.
What is notable about Mosimane’s move to Cairo is that he wasn’t foolish enough to think he could take on a task like this on his own.
Rangoaga and performance analyst Musi Matlaba came with him to Ahly, and Mosimane even brought in Cavin Johnson as his assistant, a man who has swiftly gone from a year in which he was sacked by Black Leopards and suffered a heart attack, to one in which he is also a Champions League winner.
The win over Zamalek wasn’t just for the people of Egypt, you see, it was also for South Africa.
What an export for this country “Jingles” has been, and expect him to rack up several more trophies before his time at Ahly is up.