SO, Irvin Khoza was pained by Vladimir Vermezovic’s resignation as Orlando Pirates coach! Really?
The Buccaneers chairman said in a statement announcing the departure of the Serb this week that he “wished he had stayed longer and had more success at Orlando Pirates”.
Talk about not being in touch with the needs of your club and players … What the chairman clearly missed was that Vermezovic was fast digging the Buccaneers a grave from which there was going to be no getting out.
You saw it in the former Kaizer Chiefs coach’s continued chopping and changing of his line-up that the man just had no clue what he was doing. That Pirates go into this afternoon’s Soweto derby trailing Amakhosi by a massive 15 points should tell Khoza his coach was taking the club on the road to nowhere, fast.
And the reason for this is fairly simple: Vermezovic is not cut out to coach in our country.
Granted, he has won some cup competitions with both Chiefs and Pirates, but those successes were, for me, in spite of him.
I’ve always argued that the best coaches are those who complement their players’ talents, the ones who bring their football knowledge and adapt it to the conditions where they find themselves working.
Not so Vermezovic, and a few of his ilk from Europe. Pretty arrogant, the former Partizan coach failed – no, make that refused – to gain an understanding of the mentality of local players, so he thought he could impose his way on the teams he coached.
At Pirates, they speak of how he rubbed a number of players up the wrong way, his military-style leadership not working at all.
And why would it, in a country where players are generally those who perform best under the inspirational leadership kind?
Not only did VV create enemies with his players, he did so with the media as well.
At a number of his post-match press conferences, the man’s disrespect and poor human relations often came to the fore, VV giving terse and often disrespectful responses to questions – particularly after a defeat. He came across as someone who thought he knew it all and thus needed not to be questioned.
Perhaps he’s in the wrong sport, for football is a team game where even the best of coaches still need the support of their assistants. More importantly, they need their players to buy into their way of doing things. One got the impression that VV didn’t get this right.
One wonders if Khoza consulted with Kaizer Motaung – before he brought the Serb back to the country – to find out why the Chiefs boss fired him. Had he done so, he probably wouldn’t have opted for him as a coach and would have saved his club the embarrassment of losing a coach mid-season on the eve of the country’s biggest match.
The saddest thing about this episode is that we are most likely to see Vermezovic re-surfacing at some Premiership club before the season is over just as it has been the case with some European coaches.
Yet the country is teeming with local coaches who have shown their capabilities but are being kept out in the cold. Surely, what Shakes Mashaba is doing with Bafana Bafana should tell the clubs that local coaches are capable, if only given enough time and space to work their magic.
After all, they understand our players’ mentality much better than the many Europeans who are simply here to make a quick buck. And most of them can hardly get a job in their own countries.
Methinks it is about time our club chairmen stopped believing in mediocre European coaches and had faith in our own. - Saturday Star