SoccerClub polled prominent football experts to come up with a list of the top 10 coaches in the history of the domestic game. This month we arrive at second place, where Gavin Hunt is the choice.

Last season Gavin Hunt passed the milestone of 1 000 games as a coach in the topflight of South African football, saw his celebratory game called off at half-time because of faulty floodlights, and a few weeks later was sacked.

But you cannot keep a good man down, and before the kick-off of the new Premier Soccer League campaign, there was a familiar face again among the list of the 16 coaches, this time in charge of newly promoted Durban City.

They are the ninth different club he has taken charge of in the top echelon of the domestic game, but much more remarkable has been his longevity.

This is the 28th successive season the 61-year-old has been involved at the highest level of the domestic game.

Add to that the fact he was a professional footballer at Hellenic, and briefly Cape Town Spurs from his debut in 1982, as a schoolboy teenager fresh from the South African Under-16s, up until a knee injury ended his playing days in 1994.

That is over 40 years of almost continuous involvement in the game.

He was a nuggety right-back, who never won a medal but came close in a side that was a consistent contender.

Much of his playing career was under the ex-England international Budgie Byrne, who was a major influence on his thinking about the game … and his father-in-law.

Coaching was something he took to easily and enjoyed while he was still playing, earning extra cash as a schools’ coach.

But his first job came fortuitously as he sat in the bar at Vasco da Gama club one day contemplating his future after Hellenic did not renew his contract.

Vasco was in the amateur ranks and needed a coach, and it was at the club in Parow that he cut his teeth.

When Seven Stars of the second division were looking for a coach, they poached him away by doubling his meagre salary, and it was with the club from Langa township that he began to make his name … winning promotion in 1998.

It helped that he had the teenage sensation Benni McCarthy in the side and two stalwarts from Kaizer Chiefs who were finishing off their glittering careers – Fetsi ‘Chippa’ Molatedi and Trevor ‘KKK’ Mthimkulu.

Moving away from Cape Town in 2001 is what put him on a much faster trajectory.

“I got fired by Hellenic! I was out of work for half a season almost, and then I got a phone call from (Black Leopards owner) David Thidiela. He said, ‘Come’, and I said, ‘Sure’, and got on the plane immediately. I was gatvol of how I had been treated in Cape Town. Ajax Cape Town told me, ‘Don’t do anything, we’ll get back to you’. I’m still waiting for that call some 30 years later.

“We drove from Jo’burg airport. Polokwane was the furthest we ever went, so I had no idea how far Thohoyandou was. I’ll never forget, the next day was a Monday, and he said to me, ‘Oh, by the way, we are playing Pirates in a friendly on Saturday’. ‘Pirates! How’s your team? I asked him. He said, ‘We don’t have a team’.”

“They were carrying sandbags up a hill for 400 metres for training. I said, ‘Where’s the training field?’ He said, ‘You’re standing on it’. It was a cattle field in the army barracks. There must have been some 60 players. I had to get rid of more than half of them.”

“The best way was to just get them to play a game and cut it down to 18. I had to fight with David over which players to let go and which to keep. I’ve never been so nervous for a football match as before that one. I thought I’d get skinned alive. Ted Dumitru was the coach of Pirates, he sauntered in with his team like he thought he owned the place.”

“They had a powerful squad, but we had them 3–0! I had to go back home the next day and get some clothes. I was in the hotel room, and David said, ‘What do you want to earn?” I had no idea, we had no agents in those days. I took my old Hellenic contract and said, ‘David, just pay me that’.

“It was R20 000 a month. He said, ‘no problem’. I said to him to bring the team to Jo’burg for the last weeks of the pre-season so we could play some games. He organised that we played Sundowns, SuperSport, Wits, Cosmos. We beat them all. I thought this was the worst thing ever because now everyone thought we could win the league!”

Hunt was named Coach of the Year after taking the team to eighth place and Moroka Swallows then swooped him away at the start of the 2002/03 season. Then he went to SuperSport United in 2007 and promptly won the title … the first of three in a row.