Orlando Pirates coach and Dutch football legend Ruud Krol must think he is in some kind of bizarre dream.
Reports, radio phone-ins and internet forums have seen him painted as some kind of dead man walking. Which to be fair is not an unusual position for football coaches, except Krol is actually having a good season. Orlando Pirates sit in sixth position in the league, just six points off log leaders Mamelodi Sundowns, with a whopping 21 games left in the season. And they have faced down Sundowns themselves in the league beating them 2-0. They are also only two points off second-placed derby rivals Kaizer Chiefs, with one less win and the same number of losses.
I must repeat, this is with 21 games left to still play in the season. On the cup front, Pirates lost the pre-season kick-about Telkom Charity Cup on sudden death penalties to Kaizer Chiefs, beat the same Kaizer Chiefs en route to winning the MTN 8 Cup, and made the final of the Telkom Knockout Cup, where they lost to Chiefs.
Now of course people would argue that it’s the losing to Kaizer Chiefs that makes fans want to get rid of Krol. I would understand their frustration here, except the PSL is bigger than Pirates-Chiefs derbies. The league season is 30 games long. Given the points tally of recent winners, losing six points to Kaizer Chiefs each season would not necessarily define any team’s campaign. And Pirates fans know well enough how starting the league like a house on fire is no guarantee for joy come late April.
It must also be noted that Krol has achieved all he has this season largely without the services of Teko Modise and Katlego Mashego, the team’s biggest stars of the last couple of years. The pair appeared to have let fame and big money salaries get to their heads recently, with Mashego only recently returning to the fold while Modise remains, deservedly a fringe player. This is after Krol persisted with him through a bad patch for most of last season, displaying faith in his then key midfielders’ talent and temperament.
This season he has dispensed with that pandering and selected his fittest best performing XI, and they have been a qualified success. This is a man who lost the league title by goal difference in his very first season coaching Orlando Pirates. The man who delivered Pirates their first cup win in what is generally considered to have been an embarrassingly long time and who took them close to a second within the same season. He has brought structure and reliability to the Pirates line-up.
You know people are clutching at straws when a coach gets criticised for using the same team in each game, but surely that is the sign of a man who knows what he is doing and whose players work hard for him? Any half-serious football fan can name off the top of their heads the preferred starting XI’s of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United. Does this make their coaches bad ones?
He has taken flak for the two losses to Kaizer Chiefs, and I would agree with that criticism. If it wasn’t for the primary fact that in a league with players as mentally fragile as the PSL, no coach can say that his team consistently manages to come back from conceding first to win the game. That just does not happen in the PSL. Opening the scoring, be it via an own goal or an amateurish defensive howler as Chiefs did in both games, pretty much guarantees you at least a share of the spoils in the PSL, it is a disease that affects SA football at large. Throw in the shocking ball watching for Pirates’ other two goals in the Telkom Knockout final, and you wonder if Krol is a bad coach because his players sometimes cannot concentrate on simple tasks.
If it was that he coaches his defence poorly, Pirates should be struggling with Moroka Swallows at the lower reaches of the league right now and not be six points off the top. If Modise fails to recover his form after a season and a half of patience, whose fault is it? Does Krol coach Orlando Pirates or Modise? How is he in the wrong by having consistency in his selections?
Just what exactly is the agenda against Krol?
This article first appeared on www.newstime.co.za
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