A great footballer and legendary journalist combine to tell a magical football story

Benni McCarthy has always been an excellent storyteller, an erudite and intelligent human being and footballer.

When his stature and gift of the gab are combined with the experience and journalistic and editorial nous of a giant of African journalism in the co-writer with McCarthy, Mark Gleeson, you have a biography in Benni that is simply the book South African football has been crying out for.

For far too long far too many former players in this country have taken their written stories to non-established writers — barely-known stringers, sketchy authors with practically no journalistic experience in the levels of research and ability to understand the salient and poignant facts in an interview that make a great story. For what is a sports biography, but a long interview and story?

McCarthy sitting to tell his spectacular footballing story — from the gang-ridden streets of the toughest of neighbourhoods, Hanover Park, to theatres of dreams in Europe, becoming Bafana Bafana’s top scorer in a love-hate relationship under an assortment of national coaches — to a legendary scribe like Gleeson who can condense it into a clear, exciting narrative, is gold.

It’s what South African football supporters — once deprived for so many decades of enough top-class print coverage of their sport by rugby and cricket-obsessed, apartheid-era sports editors — have been crying out for in book form.

Publishers have shied from backing South African football books, saying they just don’t sell. Such books have also just not always been done at all well. One can only hope Benni sells well, to start changing that narrative.

McCarthy’s story is laid out in an entertaining essay that bears the hallmarks of his famous ability to spin a fable, the excellent nature of the story he has to tell, edited into a palatable banquet via Gleeson’s renowned easy-to-read writing style.

It adds plenty of value that the relationship goes back to when Gleeson was editor of Kickoff in the 1990s and the staff would enjoy beers after work watching matches of Seven Stars — like the magazine, owned by Rob Moore — when McCarthy emerged at that club. Moore became McCarthy’s agent. As with any good sports book, it’s the details that reveal more behind what’s been reported through a player’s career that make for the meat of the meal.

Pitso Mosimane, speaking as Bafana Bafana prepare to face Kenya, which McCarthy coaches, in 2027 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) qualifiers at Orlando on Friday and in Nairobi on Tuesday, accentuated the former Ajax Amsterdam, FC Porto, Blackburn Rovers and Orlando Pirates striking ace’s hunger to succeed as what made him a world-class player and now a promising coach. It’s a feature that permeates Benni.

In his foreword, Jose Mourinho, for whom McCarthy was a key player when FC Porto won the 2004 Uefa Champions League, which McCarthy remains the only South African gold medal-holder in, writes: “Benni, for me, was a fantastic, wonderful player, and, as I have emphasised, it was not just the goals, but rather the style of play that the team could employ by having him in it. He was a good football player. If he was not a striker, he could be a number 10 or a winger coming on the inside. In the modern game, he would fit into any one of these positions.”

South Africans were enthralled by the career of the player from his emergence at 18 at Moore’s Stars and Cape Town Spurs, quick progression via the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) and later World Cup glory to Ajax, then Portugal, Spain and the English Premier League, dazzling on famous football fields.

“Hanover Park was a tough place to grow up in and the temptation was always there,” McCarthy relates of his childhood.

“There were times when the gangs asked us to hold guns for them when the police came by and wanted to search them. Drugs were all around as well. Everyone smoked dagga, there were pills and then, later, cocaine started coming in. Getting sucked into the drug culture was a lot about the territories that we were from. My area was the Americans gang turf. We couldn’t go to the terminus because at the terminus were the Mongrels. On the other side was the Backstreet Boys.

“You had to know your boundaries, but because I was a sportsman I could usually go anywhere. They knew me as a football guy, not a gangster. For others in the neighbourhood there were times they went to the shops at the terminus, maybe sent on an errand by their parents, and then the gangsters would spot them and give them a smack, because they came from the Americans area. It was a territorial atmosphere, and what happened to many guys was that they became so scared they thought they might as well just join a gang because at least then you were protected.

“You can go into another gang’s territory and attack them, and when you wipe them out, you can go everywhere. Suddenly you are powerful, and people are scared of you.

“... It also meant you got the girls, those who were attracted to the gangsters’ power. I think for most of my friends that started becoming an attraction and immediately and automatically they were involved with drug dealing. The gangsters themselves didn’t want to sell the drugs, the youngsters did it on their behalf, and very soon they’d have money at their disposal. It was very seductive.”

McCarthy joined a star-studded Ajax in 1997; was top scorer, including four goals in 13 minutes against Namibia under Jomo Sono helping 1996 champions Bafana reach the 1998 Afcon final, then move to Spain with Celta Vigo. He reveals the frustrations at the La Liga club, which blocked moves and where he often found himself benched by coaches including Víctor Fernández, who later would be a stumbling block to McCarthy at Porto in Portugal, where he also had trouble moving to interested clubs in the player’s dream destination, the EPL.

At Porto, McCarthy enjoyed his most exciting period under an emerging global coaching force not yet nicknamed “The Special One”, Mourinho, winning cups and titles and becoming a darling of the fans.

McCarthy’s major contribution in the Champions League triumph came when he scored the two superb goals in the first leg of the last 16 against Manchester United in Porto and set up the late-equalising winner in the second leg at Old Trafford, the boyhood dream ground and club of the childhood United fanatic.

The win was made sweeter because McCarthy had the ‘don’t meet your heroes’ experience.

“It was hostile from the start in Manchester, even in the tunnel as we all lined up before kick-off. They were already swearing at us and calling us ‘cheating bastards’? We were also calling them every name under the sun in Portuguese! It was a duel that was destined to be a cracker.

“Though I had been a massive Manchester United supporter growing up, I didn’t let Old Trafford overawe me. I was concentrating on my own game and determined to play the best match of my life at the Theatre of Dreams.

“Revenge and progress in the Champions League were front and centre, but I must be honest and admit that in the back of my mind I thought that if I played the best game I had ever played, maybe Sir Alex Ferguson would see something in me. Maybe something he didn’t see in Louis Saha, Diego Forlán and Ruud van Nistelrooy, who were falling out of favour at that time.

“... But my overriding emotion was anger, the same as the rest of my teammates. We were determined, and losing was not an option. To be frank, with all that went on around that Champions League clash, I had lost a lot of respect for my favourite club. Some of the players I used to admire, indeed adore, turned out to be a real disappointment. When you put aside their talents, none of them turned out to be pleasant guys.

“And I even lost my close friendship with [Bafana teammate] Quinton Fortune. We didn’t speak after the first leg for about three or four years. When I went up to talk to him after the game, he waved me away, saying he couldn’t speak to me. It left me bemused that someone I’d known since I was 10 didn’t want to exchange pleasantries or have a little catch-up after the match. ‘Oh well,’ I thought to myself, ‘if that’s your attitude then so be it, life moves on.’ But it did leave a sour taste.”

Gross underdogs Porto were “on the back foot from the first minute of the second leg”.

“They brought the fire to us, with a Premier League tempo. It was intense. Roy Keane might have complained in the past about the socialites eating prawn sandwiches in suites at [Old Trafford], but we were served a dish of chilli-hot football by them.

“The Portuguese league was good, but the pace was nothing compared to the English way. Man United wanted to exhaust us and take us out of our comfort zone. It really felt that the game was being played at 100 miles an hour, but the minute we found our feet, we started putting a couple of passes together, kept them at bay, and slowly grew into the game.

“Then came a sucker punch. Paul Scholes scored for them. They were full speed ahead, like an unstoppable steam train. We were not used to defending with everyone behind the ball, but Mourinho had prepared us mentally for what we were going to be up against at Old Trafford.

“He predicted we might be on the back foot for 70 minutes, or even the full 90 minutes, but we should be able to maintain and control the situation. And we would get opportunities. Again, losing was not an option. That had been our mantra from the first leg.

“Then we got lucky when Scholes’s second goal was disallowed for offside. If they had had VAR back then, it would likely have stood.

Mourinho came to talk to me about it in the days leading up to the game and said I had been the one who had got the team to the final. But [Brazilian] Derlei had been unlucky because of injury and had proven himself on his return in the semifinal against Deportivo de La Coruña.

—  Benni McCarthy

“Trailing 1-0, we were going out on the away-goals rule, but I felt we were still in the tie. They dropped a little intensity, allowed us more time on the ball and I thought maybe we had an opportunity to sneak it. We won a last-minute free kick and I took it. Usually if a free kick was close to the goal, one of the technicians in the team, like Deco, would take it, but because I had a powerful shot, Mourinho ran down the touchline to shout orders that I must take it. Deco had already squandered a few free kicks, but he wanted to take another. I said let me take it. He said he felt confident and I could take the next one. But our captain Jorge Costa came running down and told Deco, ‘Mister says piss off, let Benni take it?

“I’d had no clear chances all game, but the fact the coach had confidence in me was a boost. I said to myself, top corner, my friend. I looked up at the giant TV screen, and it showed worried Manchester United fans, some with their hands covering their eyes. I really felt it was my moment. As I hit the ball, I started celebrating. I felt it was flying into the top corner, but somehow Howard parried my shot. Costinha, however, pounced on the rebound to make it 1-1 and give us the aggregate victory.”

McCarthy tells of his heartbreak at missing a starting place for the 3-0 final win against AS Monacom yet he revelled in his 78th-minute introduction at Veltins Arena in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

“To think it was not long ago that I was sitting in a ghetto in Hanover Park dodging bullets, and now I was at the biggest game in club football! I had been out in the cold at Celta Vigo with nowhere to go; I had wanted to quit football. A lot of things went through my mind in the days before the game, but the biggest was just how remarkably your life can change through the great game of football.”

The rest follows. Mourinho’s desire but failure to bring McCarthy to Chelsea, finally landing an EPL club at Blackburn and becoming second-top scorer to Didier Drogba in 2006-07, a loss of form coinciding with a disastrous move to West Ham leading to missing Carlos Parreira’s 2010 Bafana World Cup squad, returning to win a treble at Orlando Pirates. Calling Hammers boss Karren Brady “the devil with tits” in the media. The transition to coaching with good stints at Cape Town City and AmaZulu and landing a dream job as forwards coach for two years under manager Erik ten Hag at Man United. The Kenya job.

It is all laid out, so much background detail straight from the striker’s mouth added. What a story. And what a read.

• Benni,