The country’s two longest serving coaches will be pitting their wits up against each other on Friday evening when Moroka Swallows take on SuperSport United in the DStv Premiership (live on SuperSport).

Between them, visiting coach Gavin Hunt, 59, and the home side’s Steve Komphela have taken charge of 1 418 top flight games and both been involved in the game for decades.

In Hunt’s case it is over four decades and for Komphela, who is three years younger, almost 40 years from when he made his top division debut as a centre back at the then Fairway Stars.

Hunt is on course to break the 1 000-match mark as a coach in the top flight of South African football, but will have to wait until next season to do so.

The SuperSport United coach, who turns 60 next July, is in his 26th successive season in the leading division of South African football and started the 2023/24 campaign with a record of 942 games in charge.

He has since added a further 20 games to the tally following Sunday’s African Confederation Cup tussle against Al Hilal Benghazi in Libya where SuperSport were beaten.

So far this season SuperSport have won eight, lost nine and drawn three games and have an overall inferior goal difference of 22 for and 25 against.

That brings Hunt’s overall tally to 405 wins (the away win over Stellenbosch in late August being No 400), 273 draws and 284 losses. His teams have scored 1247 goals and conceded 992.

Hunt reached the 900-game tally during his time at Kaizer Chiefs, which is one of the eight clubs he has coached in the top flight of the domestic game. The season before that at Bidvest Wits, he broken the record for the most games by a coach, surpassing the old record of 816 held by Gordon Igesund.

Hunt has been omnipresent in South African football for some four decades since his debut for Hellenic as a 17-year-old schoolboy

His first top flight club was Seven Stars, who he promoted up from the National First Division with Benni McCarthy as the star player. Their first game in the 1998-99 season was a 1-0 away win at Moroka Swallows but followed by a run of nine matches without a win and Hunt thought his career would be short-lived as he faced an early sacking.

But he carried on and then made his name with newly promoted Black Leopards in the 2001-02 season, as they finished eighth and he was named Coach of the Year.

His first league title came in his 10th season in charge when he moved from Moroka Swallows to SuperSport United and he won three in a row with the club from 2008 to 2010. A fourth title came at Wits in 2017.

Next on the list of long serving coaches is Komphela, the former Bafana Bafana captain who has also had spells as the national team’s caretaker coach and taken charge of the country’s under-23 team. His playing career started at Fairway (later Free State) Stars before he moved to Chiefs and then a spell in Turkey before returning home and taking to the coaching ranks.

Komphela’s first coaching job was at Manning Rangers, who fired him after six games only for him to return after a stint at Dynamos and take them to the 2004 Absa Cup, which they lost 3-1 to Hunt’s Swallows.

After working with the national team, he was back in club management in 2009 with Free State Stars, before stints at Platinum Stars, Free State Stars (again), Maritzburg United and Chiefs, where he was again a losing cup finalist. Komphela is yet to win any coaching silver in his 470 games in charge (169 wins, 142 draws, 156 defeats).

He worked at Bloemfontein Celtic and then Lamontville Arrows before accepting an assistant coach role behind Rulani Mokwena and Manqoba Mngqithi at Mamelodi Sundowns for the last three season. He returned to a head coach role at Swallows at the start of this season

Ernst Middendorp’s return at Cape Town Spurs, who played Sundowns on Wednesday in a battle between top and bottom, was an eighth different club in South African football for the 65-year-old former Bundesliga coach, who arrived in South Africa in 2005 to take charge of Chiefs. He has had four separate spells at Maritzburg and another at Chiefs, losing the chance to win the league title on the last day of the Covid-impacted 2019-20 season. Arrows, Celtic, Chippa United, Free State Stars and Moroka Swallows are the other clubs he has worked at, and in between his 20-odd years in South Africa, he has also taken jobs back in Germany, Cyprus, Ethiopia and Thailand.

Wednesday’s match at Sundowns was the 406th in charge of a South African side with 137 wins, 127 draws and 143 defeats.

Eric Tinkler, 53, is the fourth most experienced coach in the DStv Premiership with 321 games as coach of Wits, Orlando Pirates, Cape Town City (two spells), SuperSport, Chippa, and Maritzburg. He began as acting coach at Wits in 2007 when Boebie Solomons was fired, and Tinkler lost six of his opening eight games.

It was another seven years before he was a head coach again, this time for the second half of the 2013-14 season at Pirates after Roger de Sa resigned. Tinkler then returned to an assistant coach role under Vladimir Vermezovic but was elevated back to coach when the Serbian left. When Cape Town City was established in 2016, Tinkler was their first coach and after a successful first season poached by SuperSport, where he won the 2017 Telkom Knockout. He returned to City in 2021, via Chippa and Maritzburg, and is now in his third successive season at the club.

The 65-year-old Cavin Johnson, who is serving as acting coach at Chiefs and likely to stay in that role until the end of the season, has had 270 games as a coach of a South African club, having begun at the School of Excellence and then as a youth coach at Ajax Cape Town. In 2002, when the Englishman Rob McDonald was sacked, he took over for the last 10 games of the season at Ajax.

But it would be almost a decade before he was back on the sidelines again in a topflight match, coaching at Platinum Stars, who he took to a surprise runners-up berth in 2013. Johnson then moved to SuperSport as the successor to Gavin Hunt before returning to Platinum Stars in 2015. In 2017 he moved to AmaZulu for two seasons and was briefly in charge at Black Leopards in 2020.

Mzansi Football