Cape Town - At the start of his tenure as Orlando Pirates’ head coach in June 2022, little-known Spaniard José Riveiro was ridiculed as the supporters gave him no chance of success with the Sea Robbers.
Local fans called the coach a ‘plumber’ and Riveiro was quite perplexed when he became aware of the label.
But five months later, ‘The Ghost’ were over the moon after Riveiro steered the team to the MTN8 knockout title.
After Saturday’s Nedbank Cup semi-final win over arch rivals Kaizer Chiefs, ‘the plumber’ has steered Pirates to another cup final as the Buccaneers claimed a 2-1 victory in the final throes of extra-time.
At Saturday’s post-match media conference, the club’s media officer introduced Riveiro and said he had guided Pirates to a second cup final this season. Riveiro interjected and said: “Make that three.”
He reminded all in attendance that Pirates also reached the Carling Black Label final last November.
Riveiro said he was never phased by the ‘pumber’ tag because he was always confident.
“I am a very optimistic guy, very positive, even though it doesn’t always seem that way,” said Riveiro.
“I promise you, I always think everything is going to be alright. I swear.
“In sport, you need to have that mentality in my opinion. Wherever you are, you must approach your life and your profession with that mentality.
“You must make sure that you compete and convince those around you that everything is possible. I am coaching Pirates, and with all the respect for everyone else, it is possible to be successful.
“This team has fantastic material and a lot of quality. I am the proud coach and not the winning coach.
“I don’t win games. The team does that.
“I am proud of the people who are working with me, the players that I am trying to lead in the best way possible.”
Riveiro said he had serious concerns about the team’s heavy schedule ahead of Saturday’s match, but added that he was thankful that the players wanted to bring glory to the club.
“If you ask the players, they will tell you that they would rather be playing every three days than playing less,” said Riveiro.
“They are playing very often, especially at this time of the season. At the start of the season, it is different because you need to implement things, do adaptations and some of the players are struggling with physical conditioning.”
Riveiro was pleased with the mental shift in the Pirates camp and the players are showing greater commitment.
“Everything was good in this match, and we managed to play with our rhythm. Losing games is not nice and isn’t funny,” said Riveiro.
“Our obligation is to learn from these games and now it’s easy to say that because we’ve won. Until we did the things, we wanted do to in the rhythm that we wanted, you could say we did better things than we did in the previous game.
“Our mental approach to this game was different to the other games because I think for the previous derbies, we weren’t in a good space. There were many things that affected us that I can’t say out loud that didn’t allow us to be in the condition that we wanted to be in.
“In this game, things were different in our camp, and it showed in that we were competitive in a scenario that we weren’t competitive in before.”
Pirates will be in action again on Saturday when they host Sekhukhune United at Orlando Stadium in their penultimate Premiership match of the season. Their last league game is against AmaZulu a week later.
After that they will play the Nedbank Cup final on May 27.
@Herman_Gibbs
IOL Sport