Benni set to face up to Baxter again

Bucs striker, Chiefs coach to meet in derby for first time since 2005 snub

KAIZER Chiefs coach Stuart Baxter and Orlando Pirates striker Benni McCarthy will come face to face in Saturday’s Soweto Derby at FNB Stadium for the first time since an acrimonious parting of ways when the two were with Bafana Bafana in the mid-2000s.

Baxter was the under-pressure coach of Bafana in November 2005 who, following his failure to qualify for the 2006 World Cup, needed a lifeline with a win in a friendly against Senegal in Port Elizabeth.

McCarthy, having had his run-ins with Safa and Bafana coaches before, dumped Baxter after a call-up to the game, claiming injury and only letting the coach know five days before the game, just before the team went into camp.

A few months earlier assistant coach Steve Komphela had similarly dumped Baxter by resigning just when the politics surrounding the Englishman in the Bafana hot-seat was approaching fever pitch.

McCarthy’s snub was seen as a further blow to the Bafana coach’s increasingly fragile tenure.

At the time Baxter slammed McCarthy. “McCarthy’s actions are unacceptable and unprofessional. I cannot accept a player informing me two days before we go into camp that he has a niggling injury. Why has he left it to the last minute to tell me?” the coach said of the then FC Porto striker.

Bafana went on to lose the friendly 3-2, sunk by Momar Ndiaye’s 84th-minute goal. Within a week Baxter had quit as national coach and Ted Dumitru led SA to a disastrous Africa Cup of Nations finals campaign in Egypt two months later in January 2006.

Meanwhile, Ajax Cape Town coach Jan Pruijn has given a damning assessment of his squad: “You’re not good enough.”

The Urban Warriors lost 3-0 to Kaizer Chiefs on Tuesday night, their seventh defeat of the season, and Pruijn says they will look to bring in “two or three” new players in the January transfer window.

He also said the break in league action for the festive season and 2013 Africa Cup of Nations could not come fast enough as he was battling to find the right XI.

“I said to the players after the Chiefs game, ‘I respect you a lot, but after this performance we must admit that we are not good enough’,” Pruijn said.

“If I look at the squad I have now, how many real winners do we have? . . . We must look to sign not just players who can win us duels in the middle of the park, but also ball players who can help us attack.”