I’ve come to realize, in my several years of sports journalism, that press conferences done by coaches have the propensity to reveal a lot about them and the way in which they think.
This is why I often look forward to them, pre- and post matches, not to mention that they help with drawing inspiration for the pieces I write for this blog. This is also why I looked forward to Wednesday’s Nedbank Cup pressers that were to be done by representatives of the eight clubs that will wrestle for semi-final places this weekend, with the four quarter-finals set to be played between Friday and Sunday.
Inevitably, I found two pressers particularly interesting: that of Mamelodi Sundowns head coach Rulani Mokwena – whose side will play the sole First Division survivers, the University of Pretoria on Friday – as well as that of his opposite number at the defending champions Orlando Pirates, Jose Riveiro, whose team visit AmaZulu on Saturday. The latter is the inspiration for this piece.
Theirs were inevitably the ones I found the most compelling simply because the two men lead arguably the two best teams in the Premier Soccer League at present. I also wrote in my last piece about the Nedbank Cup that it was good that the two sides were kept apart in the quarter-final stage, lest we be denied the possibility of seeing them face off in the semis, or better yet, in the final, at which stage, I dare say, their contest would be even more interesting.
Jose Riveiro at his usual persuasive this week, saying all the right things about his Buccaneers and where he believes they can still go, until the point at which he was asked about their inconsistency in the league.
Pirates are, at the time of writing, in third position on the DStv Premiership log, having amassed just 37 points in their first 23 games, and are two points behind Stellenbosch FC, who are second. They are a further 13 points behind the log-leading Sundowns, who have played three games less.
What I found most compelling about Riveiro’s 38-minute sit-down with journalists this week was his attempt to explain why they, as a fellow big club that should, actually, be much closer to Sundowns on the log, are not. He insinuated that Sundowns are able to establish the lead that they have and go for as long as they have without losing a single game in the league because they are being unduly assisted.
He didn’t say it in as many words, but it wasn’t difficult to make out that he meant the refereeing was helping the Brazilians along.
After edging Cape Town Spurs 1-0 on Tuesday, the champions have now gone 44 matches unbeaten in the league, with their last loss being all of 19 months ago.
They were, admittedly, awarded a penalty they weren’t supposed to be given at the Athlone Stadium, with which they scored. While before this week’s incident, there was last week’s uproar, following the ball-on-the-goal-line incident against Young Africans in the CAF Champions League, which inspired the Tanzanian side to launch an off-field attack on Sundowns by requesting for the African Confederation to investigate the possibility of match-fixing in that contest.
So, it was against that backdrop that Riveiro made his irresponsible remarks, which, I believe, made it obvious that he was referring to the refereeing being in Sundowns’s favour.
This shameful accusation exposed the degree to which he can no longer bear to witness Sundowns making light work of his side’s weak attempt to compete for the league title with them. For a coach whose side last dropped points when they failed to beat a lowly Swallows side two matches ago – their seventh draw of the season, to go with six losses – he sounded inexplicably bullish when answering the said question by a journalist…
“We can talk about consistency until the end of our lives, but it’s not the only thing to talk about. Then, [when we look at] the top, we’re competing against a point-machine right now. One team that [hasn’t lost] one game in the last forty, forty-something games, I don’t know. Is that what you call not being consistent? If you want to go to the past, we can go to the previous season, also. We got 54 points. Usually, you win the title in South Africa with 60, so we got 54… but again, we are competing with a point-machine, they don’t lose.
“I don’t know [where] we’re gonna finish this season; probably, we’re gonna pass that number, I’m pretty sure that we can do it, we can be close. But again… and then, you can analyze the reasons why. We’re trying; we’re trying. But it’s difficult, it’s very difficult to get close for many, many, many different reasons – it’s very difficult to get close. but we’re getting there.”
The Spaniard lost the opportunity to address the greater and more real problem of poor officiating in the league with this answer. It was, once again, a case of misdirected anger at Sundowns’s success, as it was with Young Africans.
I started questioning Riveiro’s capability to return Pirates to their former glory days since the start of this season, and this week, he proved that he is indeed a man out of ideas about how to achieve that with how he threw unnecessary insults at a team that he and the rest of league should be appreciating more and striving to learn from.
* Featured image: iDiski Times
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