Many South Africans, so keen can we be to shoot down our own, predicted Pitso Mosimane would not last six months when he joined Al Ahly.
Now that he has left after 21 months, many say that was not long enough. In Egypt, 21 months is a lifetime for a football coach to lead the giants, Al Ahly and Zamalek.
Egypt’s population is 100-million, and 70-million are reputed to be Al Ahly supporters. The scale of everything when coaching a club like the Red Devils is bigger than anything in SA. The club is 115 years old; Orlando Pirates are 85 and Kaizer Chiefs 52, and the top-flight emergence of Mosimane’s old club Mamelodi Sundowns came in the 1980s.
Ahly competed in continental club competition since its origins in the 1960s and along the way won 10 Caf Champions League (previously the African Cup of Champion Clubs) trophies — the next highest are Zamalek and TP Mazembe with five.
They display 42 league titles and 37 Egypt Cups in their beautiful main campus on the Nile River island of Zamalek. They have two other campuses in Cairo that house football development projects.
Even if Ahly are the more sensible in reputation for coach hiring and firing policy than Zamalek, when a club boasts that weight of history and winning culture two matches without a win are greeted as a subject of concern to be weightily dissected.
Mosimane was criticised by Ahly legends and some pundits even when he was winning. That had something to do with envy at the position he usurped, especially as the first black sub-Saharan African to do so.
He carried that path-finding role with the seriousness its responsibility deserved. And his success will pave, and has already cleared, the way for others, such as Democratic Republic of the Congo compatriot Florent Ibenge, who won the 2021/22 Caf Confederation Cup with Morocco’s RS Berkane.
Mosimane won Ahly’s first Caf Champions League — the trophy the club covets most — in seven years soon after his arrival from Sundowns in September 2020.
He became just the fourth coach in the competition’s 58-year history to defend the title in 2020/21, taking him to three titles in all (he won it with Sundowns in 2016), the second-most of any coach after Ahly’s legendary 2000s and 2010s coach Manuel Jose with four.
He won two Caf Super Cups, and ranks the two third-place finishes — as considerable as Ahly’s resources are by African standards, they remain less than those of clubs in Europe and South America — as on a par with the Champions League successes. There was an Egyptian Cup too, and Mosimane’s failure to win a league title — he wrapped up the 2019/20 championship that had already been clinched under predecessor Rene Weiler — was largely due to the punishing match schedule that arose from Ahly’s international successes.
Mosimane took on a coaching job the weight of which had not previously been carried by a South African coach, treading where no tactician from this country had gone before. He carried it with an aplomb that has furthered the cause not only of South Africans, but also black sub-Saharan Africans, in the prestigious coaching dugouts of North Africa and perhaps further afield.
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