Former Bafana Bafana and Kaizer Chiefs defender Morgan Gould has opened up on his ambitions in his new coaching role.
Gould retired from football at the end of the 2020/21 season but was awarded a new position to become an assistant coach for the club’s MDC team, working alongside Themba Masango.
In a recent interview with iDiski Times senior writer Velile Mnyandu, Gould opened up on his coaching assistant, who is an unknown to many.
“I embraced the final conversation that we had and I requested that they team me up with someone who is very knowledgeable, not someone whose there to just come and pass,” he told iDiski Times.
“And they gave me someone that I am currently working under, which is Themba Masango, he’s been in the game. He knows the ABC Motsepe, the township football and the highest level of football because he groomed a lot of players that came through his hands that are currently playing, and it just make sense to me to learn from someone like that.
“I know he is unknown in football and I can tell you that those are the most powerful people, the unknowns.”
When asked whether he’s enjoying his first few weeks into his new journey, Gould admitted that he is not as calm on the sidelines as he’d thought and also explained how being a father to some players is also a role of the coach.
“I’m losing my voice every day at training because now I’m the one who’s shouting more than anyone else, and I’m also afforded the opportunity to run the training sessions,” he added.
“Learning in terms what to do, how to do it, what messages you wanna send across in certain excises. Ja, so I usually thought I would be a calm coach, but I can’t let the kids down, because they need help.
“Sometimes you see a situation that they don’t see because I encountered it while I was on the field, so they need to be helped, they need to be nursed and 90% of the kids in the team are not from a stable background, they don’t have the bare necessities.
“There’s a kid in the team right now who travels almost from the North West because he is on the other side of Randfontein. So I need to pick him up when he comes from school and take him to training, and he uses public transportation back home.
“And those are fatherly things, family things but I wanna do it for the kid, his biological father is not there but he’s got a father on the field to say this person is looking out for me, this person is wanting me to become a better person.
“Anyone can be a better footballer if you train hard and if you get individual coaching, but you can’t be a good person if you don’t have good people around to teach you how to become a good person and have good morals and beliefs.”
You can read the full interview with Morgan Gould where he also chats about why he retired, his times at Kaizer Chiefs and SuperSport, in edition 39 of iDiski Times.
