Being Benni: The rise to fame of Bafana’s top-scorer

My first experience with Bafana Bafana went sour very quickly when I lost my wallet and passport. I had been invited to attend a friendly match against England at Old Trafford in May 1997, even though I wasn’t part of the squad. The South African Football Association (Safa) thought it would be a good idea for me to spend a few days around the camp to get a sense of what playing for the national team was all about.

I think I left my passport on the train after flying in from Amsterdam, and I was in tears when I realised what I’d done.

To make matters worse, no-one was really interested in helping me. I was still a teenager, in a foreign land, with no documentation and no help — especially not from Safa.

I didn’t know what to do. I just sat in the hotel lobby crying my heart out. It was back-up goalkeeper Brian Baloyi who introduced me to Percy Adams and asked him to help. My lifelong friendship with Percy began there and then. He was at the game as a representative of one of the sponsors, and took pity on me. He took me to London and helped me to sort out new documentation at the High Commission. Percy had no role at Safa and was not obligated to help me at all; he did it from the goodness of his heart.

That was how what became a love-hate relationship with Bafana Bafana began. Of course, it was my fault I lost the passport, but I felt Safa couldn’t have cared less. They just left me hanging.

My first cap for the country came the next month in a friendly against the Netherlands at Soccer City in Johannesburg. The match was played just four days before a must-win World Cup qualifier against Zambia, so the line-up against the Dutch featured a lot of new faces. There had been pressure on coach Clive Barker to pick me earlier during the World Cup qualifiers, but he had a settled side, the bulk of whom had won the Cup of Nations a year earlier.

You should have seen the dirty looks we got from the Bafana players when we finally got to the hotel in Lens. We thought we were just going to watch the match and were very excited about being able to get to France to see the senior players in action, but then we were told we were going to play

I knew there was a pecking order. Chippa Masinga, Shaun Bartlett and Mark Williams were the preferred strikers, and then Pollen Ndlanya, who had been doing well with Kaizer Chiefs. I was okay with that. I loved playing with the under-20 side, and we were all being promoted to the under-23 side.

Still, it was brilliant to start my full international career against the Dutch, who came with a strong team featuring Clarence Seedorf and Aron Winter. Giovanni van Bronckhorst scored an absolute screamer to put them ahead and they won 2–0. I came on for the last 20 minutes in place of Williams and I enjoyed the experience of being in the camp. I felt I earned respect with what I did in training, and John “Shoes” Moshoeu, who was a key player in the side, was most encouraging.

My next call-up was not for the seniors, but rather the under-23 team, under Mich d’Avray, playing a friendly against Norway. The game in Oslo was three days before Bafana took on France. Once we finished our game, we were told to fly to France because the senior players were striking over money and refusing to play. It was a time-honoured tactic to try and force the association into a corner, but Safa’s solution was not to give the players better terms but rather to replace them with the under-23s!

You should have seen the dirty looks we got from the Bafana players when we finally got to the hotel in Lens. We thought we were just going to watch the match and were very excited about being able to get to France to see the senior players in action, but then we were told we were going to play. Luckily the whole mess was sorted out and the players got what they wanted, but that was yet another early experience of the organisational chaos that always seems to linger over the national team. I was included in the training and then among the substitutes, and I got a few minutes on the pitch at the end of the game, including a pass to Phil Masinga that I thought he should have finished for an equaliser.

My first start for Bafana was a Cosafa Cup loss in Windhoek to Namibia at the start of 1998. Jomo Sono had taken over from Clive Barker and he immediately made it clear I was a big part of his plans and that he wanted to give me as much freedom as he could so that I could become the star of the show. He made a lot of changes to the team that had served Barker so well, but who were, perhaps, becoming a little jaded. Players such as Mark Fish, Masinga, Helman Mkhalele, John Moshoeu and Lucas Radebe stayed, but Andre Arendse, Doctor Khumalo, Eric Tinkler and Neil Tovey were among those discarded.

I felt a real freedom as we went to the Cup of Nations finals in Burkina Faso. I didn’t have to do everything the coach asked and was able to try things on the pitch with the freedom of knowing there were players around me selected with the purpose of helping me to find the space I needed to try and score. I felt like the main guy and loved the freedom, but after that loss to Namibia, there were a lot of questions about what Jomo was doing. Was he right in refreshing the team so drastically?

I felt it was a good mix, with a lot of young players. Many of us had crossed paths previously in the junior national teams at under-20 and under-23 level. South Africa were the defending champions when we arrived in Burkina Faso but there was not much expectation, and the first game almost became a complete disaster for me. We played Angola in Bobo-Dioulasso and they kicked lumps out of me. I was being targeted from the start of the game by these massive defenders and at times I felt out of my depth. I could do nothing.

I got booked as early as the fifth minute for showing my frustration. The game wasn’t even 10 minutes old when an Angolan kicked under my foot, and I caught him with my studs, deliberately so. That should have been a second yellow card, and me sent off and suspended for the next two games. The Angolan was rolling around like I’d hit him with a baseball bat, obviously trying to ensure I would be booked again. I stayed down too. Jomo moved very smartly to get me off the pitch, knowing that once I had been substituted it would be too late for the referee to show me another card. While the whole commotion was going on, Jomo told me to roll off the pitch. The procedure for referees is to first check on injured players before taking any disciplinary action they deem necessary, so while I was being treated the ref came to check on me before returning to see how the Angolan was doing. Jomo then got someone to stretcher me to the dressing room, out of sight and out of mind, and brought Brendan Augustine on in my place. By the time the referee realised the ruse, I was long gone down the tunnel and he could no longer caution me. It was genius from Jomo and it saved my tournament, although the next game against the Ivory Coast he kept me on the bench until the last 20 minutes because he was scared their defenders would follow the Angolan example and kick me to provoke a reaction.

After successive draws, we had to win our last group game against Namibia to stand any chance of progress to the knockout stages. The night before the match, Jomo said to me I should wake up early on match day and go for a run to clear my head. “What nonsense is this?” I thought. He said being out on the road early in the morning, jogging alone, helped him to focus on the football later in the day. It was not something I had ever done before (or ever did much after) but I got up early that day and jogged around the complex where all the teams were staying. It was as the sun was rising and there was not another person to be seen, only vultures flying around outside.

The Namibians were cocky, having beaten us only weeks earlier. One of them said in the tunnel before the game, “You might be Bafana Bafana but to us you are banana banana”, but we did not rise to the bait.

It was one of the best Bafana games I ever played. Everything just clicked and I put my best foot forward. I felt that’s where the real me showed up, and where my game moved up a level in terms of maturity. The enormity of what I had done and the fact that no one has scored four goals in a match for Bafana since, did not sink in immediately, of course. These are not things you dwell on during the game, or even after. Most important was that we’d won, and we were going through to the quarter-finals. I thought we had a good team in Burkina Faso, one that could be spoken about with the same reverence that people attach to the winning 1996 Africa Cup of Nations side. But if we hadn’t beaten Namibia, we’d never have known the potential.

Back home, people were suggesting we were too young, a little naïve and without the requisite experience, so once we got to the knockout stages a lot of the pressure was off. That was a good thing. Also, our self-belief was suddenly sky-high and we went out all guns blazing against Morocco in the next match. We overwhelmed them with our pace and wing play, and we found ourselves in the semis against the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

That was another tough physical challenge, and I felt this was one of my best games, working well with Pollen Ndlanya with lots of clever interchanges, flicks and combinations. We were behind, but I equalised from outside the box with a low grass cutter. It remains one of my favourite goals because it was also very emotional: the relief foremost, but also the realisation we could go on and win a place in the Cup of Nations final. Then I got the winner with a tight turn in the box and a thump into the net from close range. That made it seven goals for me at the tournament and for the first time I felt I was the team’s shining star. Jomo had said he wanted to build a team around me and now I was giving him the chance to do so. I felt I had taken the opportunities and shown my technical ability.

The mood in the squad ahead of the decider against Egypt was one of elation. Most of the players had felt early on that our own people had written off the team and they were delighted to have proven them wrong. But the final turned into a real disappointment. Our preparation was poor. Jomo had gone home for a few days in the build-up and to this day I don’t understand the reasons.

We all presumed it was a personal issue. Without him there, we kind of lost that momentum we had enjoyed. The relaxed atmosphere in the camp that had helped get us this far was replaced with tension and it felt like a long week, while the rest of the tournament had flown by in such a positive spirit.

Jomo had only returned the evening before the game, and then we had to go through various rituals. We all had to bathe in some strange liquid, and things were being burnt in the change room. We hadn’t had any of that “muti” nonsense before. I’d heard about the use of muti in South African football and understood it was part of the culture for some, but this was my first experience, and it felt weird. I wasn’t into it at all. For the game, our socks had been soaked in some substance and we had to wear them like that. To me, it was an unnecessary distraction — a deviation from what had driven our success up to then — and it might have messed with some players’ minds too.

Our goalkeeper, Brian Baloyi, had been so reliable up to then, but he was undone by a long-range shot that gave Egypt an early lead. For the rest of us looked lethargic and found it hard to get going. It was like our own muti had worked against us as Egypt won comfortably, although you cannot ignore the fact they were a formidable team. Even at our best we would have had a testing encounter.

The Frenchman Philippe Troussier was our next coach as we prepared for the 1998 World Cup finals. I found himt a nightmare. He seemed determined to break down everything Jomo had built and was patronising towards the players. I felt I bore the brunt of it. “Hey McCarthy,” he would shout at training. “Your father Jomo is not here anymore; you can’t do what you like.” He saw me as Jomo’s prodigal son. I don’t know what his problem with Jomo was, but Troussier seemed to have a hatred that was hard to fathom. He bullied me intensely, consistently trying to humiliate me, which I couldn’t understand.

What I really needed at that stage of my career was a coach who could elevate my game to the next level. Instead, I got someone who was picking on me, trying to make me feel like a small boy who needed to take baby steps again when I had just come flying through the Cup of Nations tournament months earlier. The whole tournament in France was largely a miserable experience for me when it was supposed to be a career highlight.

Not many players can boast of playing at a World Cup, but frankly, most of the time I wished I was injured and didn’t have to be there. I even fantasised about punching Troussier. Mark Fish nearly did after a scarcely believable incident in training where the defenders were doing an exercise

Not many players can boast of playing at a World Cup, but frankly, most of the time I wished I was injured and didn’t have to be there. I even fantasised about punching Troussier. Mark Fish nearly did after a scarcely believable incident in training where the defenders were doing an exercise. Troussier kicked the ball high in the air, wanting the backs to head it clear, but with some elevation, presumably to clear any oncoming opponents and set up a counter-attack. Willem Jackson cleared one of the balls into touch, which set off Troussier, who grabbed him by the neck and then smacked a ball onto the side of his head. It was the most belittling incident I’ve ever seen on a training pitch and Fish bravely challenged the coach to show the players more respect.

There was continual conflict and histrionics, and absolutely no encouragement at all. After we lost the opening game 3-0 to France in Marseille, there was more drama when Troussier threatened to quit ahead of our second group game against Denmark.

He wasn’t involved in the preparation for this game and his absence galvanised the whole squad. It was like a load had been lifted from our collective shoulders. We bounced back nicely in Toulouse, having thoroughly enjoyed the training sessions under assistant coach Trott Moloto and team manager Augusto Palacios. We played with flair against a similarly exciting side and came from behind to draw 1–1, and even had our chances to win the game.

Scoring South Africa’s first World Cup finals goal earned me a place in the history books, I suppose. I couldn’t sleep the night before, so I kept playing my song Shibobo, which I had recorded with TKZee. I was singing along to “Benni’s in the 18 area”. I felt inspired, though my roommate Quinton Fortune wasn’t impressed. ‘Turn that off, I want to sleep,’ he moaned.

‘Hey man, this will make me score,’ I told him.

• This is an edited extract from Benni the authorised biography of football icon Benni McCarthy. Co-authored with Mark Gleeson. Published by Pan Macmillan South Africa