Bafana Bafana legend Benni McCarthy says he is honoured that his former coach Jose Mourinho wrote the foreword to his auto biography.
The two worked together at Porto and won the UEFA Champions League in 2004 with McCarthy the one South African player to have achieved this feat. The former AmaZulu and Manchester United coach along Mark Gleeson penned down a book documenting his life from rags to riches and it hit the shells in South Africa last week.
McCarthy told iDiski Times Editor Rob Delport that he appreciates what Mourinho said about him in the book, and he thinks it will change how a lot of people view him as a person.
“Man, just what he said about me as well,” McCarthy told iDiski Times.
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“You know, I think a lot of people’s views will change when they hear, you know, what he actually said, and how I was more than just a football player, you know, I was a humanitarian as well, and the way I conducted myself. You know that I’ve earned the respect from people, that people didn’t just respect me because I’m a goal scorer, but I was a complete player.
“I was a team player as well. For example, in the Champions League final, if I were an asshole, I would have just said, like, ‘No, I want to play. I’ve got the team to where I was,’ but if I had to be sacrificed, I’d take it, you know, I wasn’t bigger than the team. I wasn’t bigger than anybody.
“If the manager feels that that’s probably the best thing to do, and then, yeah, I take it, you know, not happy, but I take it because it’s in the best interest of the team, and I think that’s what was respected more than anything else when it comes to that. And I think that’s why he will always speak very highly of me, because I wasn’t a selfish player. I didn’t make it about me.”
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