You thought Bidvest Wits were bluffing when they said Gavin Hunt ain’t going nowhere? Think again. The club bosses have certainly backed up their statements over the last two weeks, even with the champions stuck like glue on the foot of the Absa Premiership table.
Hunt, who is greatly admired at Wits for having ended their 96-year title drought in May last year, is currently enduring what is possibly the worst spell of his coaching career.
The Clever Boys can’t buy a game. All of that despite the fact that they have, arguably, the second best squad in the league at the moment and strengthened their championship winning side by adding high-profile names like Steve Pienaar, Daylon Claasen and World Cup-bound Egyptian striker Amr Gamal, who is on a season long loan from Al Ahly.
After 14 league matches, Wits have managed just two wins. Yes, two.
And have lost an incredible seven games.
We all know that under normal circumstances Hunt would have been unemployed by now - clubs all over the world just don’t have the patience to wait for a turn around in results regardless of past success.
But Wits have bucked the trend, taking the high road and standing by their four-times league winning coach. They have in fact gone a step further.
The Clever Boys were early off the blocks in the current January transfer window in bringing in players to help improve what has so far been a catastrophic season. Their policy, it seems, is to buy a whole new team and hope Hunt makes it work.
Lehlohonolo Majoro arrived this week from Cape Town City, where he’d fallen out of favour with coach Benni McCarthy and subsequently released before the end of his contract in May to join the reigning champions.
Wits have also convinced Edwin Gyimah to ditch his Swedish club Helsingborgs IF to return to the PSL, while more names have been announced for next season. It’s unlikely they are done signing players, with Hunt telling this columnist shortly after the club’s final game of 2017 last month that there would be several players leaving in January and a few coming in. So far defender Slavko Damjanovic has been sent packing having failed to make an impact after he arrived from Montenegro before the beginning of the season.
Pienaar is also on his way out - the former Bafana skipper has also been a huge disappointment and came to blows with Hunt after defeat away to AmaZulu and has spent most of his time watching from the stands.
Every time Wits CEO Jose Ferreira answers my phone calls he greets me with the words: “I have not fired anybody, and I am not hiring anybody else”. And then he chuckles. But the fact is that he has no intentions of giving Hunt the boot, and the busy activity in the window right now is more than enough evidence that maybe it is possible to change the team and not the coach if you are certain the latter is not the problem.
Costly, but let’s see if it works.