Yup, I know, I couldn’t quite believe it either. But there you go: sport’s capacity to surprise is one of its enduring hallmarks, and so this morning’s newspapers are awash with headlines about the return of the world’s finest striker, as he appears to be marketing himself. That the world’s finest striker currently finds his well-rounded derriere parked on the bench at Ewood Park is clearly just another sign of a manager failing to appreciate natural talent and goal-scoring prowess; that lack of appreciation isn’t going to stop a return to international competition for (drums roll) Benedict McCarthy, Africa’s Maradona, South Africa’s 2010 saviour, and the only man in history to have (unofficially) gone into international retirement at half-time, but returned in time to see out the second 45 minutes.

There’s little point in debating Benni’s past track record with Bafana: tempestuous, unpredictable, and vested of a healthy dose of professional footballer’s ego (one suspects Didier Drogba is watched admiringly by McCarthy for more than just his football), the Blackburn striker has played when he’s seen fit (which has meant a moratorium on all fixtures involving airports without designer duty free stores), and while he’s had to deal with the famously inept management that continues to plague Bafana Bafana, all too often that’s simply offered a welcome platform from which to dismiss national call-ups.

As such, the anti-McCarthy camp is not insubstantial, and the point has been validly made that were John Smit to get the call-up for a Test in Rustenberg against Italy, say, or Makhaya Ntini be picked for a one-dayer against Bangladesh in Kimberley, there’s not a chance they’d pull out. The nature of European club football, and its commercial importance to a player’s career, muddies the comparisons with rugby and cricket substantially (and European managers are quick to play hardball with players representing African nations, the threat of losing a starting place freely wielded). But McCarthy’s patriotic fervour has hardly boiled over; with the World Cup now just months away, however, the nature of the questions asked changes inescapably.

Predicting a McCarthy comeback in the build-up to 2010 was almost as easy as working out that Jomo Sono would somehow be involved in the coaching set-up (the pot-bellied Cosmos boss has been nominated for ‘Coach of the Year’, based, it would seem, on getting his team promoted; this despite the fact that he got them relegated the season before, and that on current form, they’re primed to go straight back down again). It was always going to happen, and so the discussion now is this: past indiscretions aside, will a fit and committed McCarthy be an asset to South Africa’s World Cup challenge?

The commitment, whatever he may have done before, is likely to be there — a World Cup on home turf is McCarthy’s final chance to leave a significant football legacy behind. He’ll never be held in the same regard as Lucas Radebe, certainly, but then the two are very, very different men; score crucial goals in getting Bafana beyond the opening salvoes, and he’ll erase much of the ill feeling he’s spent so many years formulating amongst fans (and, one suspects, players). Fitness is probably the greater issue, both physically — there appears to be rather more of Benni than there has been in the past, and he’s almost in danger of being mistaken for his brother Jerome — and in terms of match fitness, where his role at Blackburn is dangerously peripheral.

But set against those two concerns is the simple rider that Benni McCarthy is South Africa’s best striker by some distance, and that while Bernard Parker played exceptionally in the Confederations Cup, he is the man to support the centre forward, rather than take on the role himself. Natural goal scoring is football’s most valued trait, as transfer window after transfer window underlines with a string of zeroes, and McCarthy is a natural.

And that’s why Carlos Alberto Parreira (a man Benni has great respect for, which will further smooth the striker’s reintroduction to the squad) will give the Blackburn man every opportunity to work his way into the starting XI, and hopefully re-energise a team that was listing woefully by the time Joel Santana was deported. Ignore the extent of the brashness in his comments, for that’s just Benni being Benni; as a football public, though, we have every right to demand that he backs up that self-confidence with a leaner look, complete commitment to the jersey he’s been in and out of so regularly (Wayne Rooney’s work rate is chasing back and winning ball wouldn’t be remiss in McCarthy’s armoury), and the goals we know he’s capable of. There are two very different Benni McCarthy’s; if we get the right one, then 2010 might just offer a sliver of hope.

Contact Dan at dan@metropolis.co.za

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