It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Banyana Banyana coach Desiree Ellis’s lasting education at primary school was in street soccer.
Ellis, her sisters and cousins attended Dryden Street Primary in Cape Town’s Salt River in the 1970s, and when school and homework at Auntie Susan Ellis was over, they rushed for the rough and tumble of the street.
“We played in Greef and Westminster streets,” remembers Ellis.
“We challenged teams from Foundry Road and Portland Road, the road for Salt River station. We used to buy T-shirts at Pep Stores, so we could look nice and all the teams were different. Boys and girls, we played out there for hours. Those ‘matches’ were always fun — and keenly contested.”
Enjoyable as it was, street soccer on Greef and Westminster streets was not without its perils. Ellis and her sisters and cousins played in their school shoes, often Bata Toughees, with the shoes being required to live up to their name in every conceivable way.
Sometimes, though, their shoes were not quite tough enough. Street soccer was a hard school for school shoes. Footwear could become a problem.
Toe-punts from the feisty young Ellis, never one to be intimidated by her cousins or the midfield heavies from the neighbouring streets, meant the upper of the shoe often flapped away from the sole.
School shoes were a contentious issue because she and her sisters — Erna, Carmelita and Bertina — outgrew them rapidly anyway, but woe betide if the hard knocks of street soccer aged them prematurely.
“I remember my dad [Basil, a keen footballer himself for Salt River’s Woodsides club] picking us up from Auntie Susan’s house because that’s where we went after school,” says Ellis. “He would take my shoes off my feet to protect them. Sometimes he saw their condition. He wasn’t happy.”
Other than being fretful about the condition of his daughters’ shoes, Ernest, a typewriter technician at Northern Office Equipment in Cape Town’s city centre for 18 years, was a long-suffering and loving father.
Although Ellis wryly remembers Ernest “kept trying for a boy”, she also has fond memories of pilgrimages to Hartleyvale (the ground was still standing in those days) to watch the derby between Cape Town Spurs and Hellenic. “He wrapped his arms around me for protection when we went through the turnstiles,” says Ellis, “and he kept them wrapped around me on the terraces for the whole game.”
If there was only just enough money to go around when Ellis was growing up, love was never in short supply. Ernest married a local seamstress and dressmaker, Natalie September, in 1962, and the two set up house, first in Salt River, later in several houses in Hanover Park.
An attempted burglary at their new home in one of the roughest sections of the suburb had the family scuttling for cover and the family moved out immediately. “Whenever we heard a knock on the door in that place we used to hide under the table,” says Natalie.
Natalie has always been slight and fine-boned and she jokes that when she and Ernest were courting she used to catch the train for half-fare, although she was an adult. “I used to take the train from Salt River to town to deliver his lunch and everyone used to say he was a cradle-snatcher.”
Of the four Ellis daughters it was Desiree and Carmelita who graduated with honours from the hard school of street soccer to the university that is the larger game. Both were talented midfielders, although Ellis started out as a bang-them-in striker.
“When they became aware we were sisters everyone used to joke that I played like a boy and that Carmelita played like a girl,” says Desiree.
Ellis made her league debut for Athlone Celtic against Claremont Demons aged 15 and before long was banging in the goals for the Western Province senior amateur side. She made her debut for the senior Western Province women’s side later that same year, contributing several goals to their victory in the final of the inter-provincial tournament played at the Old Mutual grounds in Pinelands.
“That was a good tournament for my dad,” she jokes, “because people realised I was his daughter. Afterwards he received quite a lot of job offers.”
Women’s football in the late 1970s and early 1980s had neither the cachet nor the public interest that it does today. It was a ghetto sport, with little sponsorship and precious little interest from either the administrators or the public. Over time the Ellis family virtually took over the running of Athlone Celtic, not because they wanted to but because the task was so thankless no one else wanted it and the club was always in one or another form of distress.
Ernest used to transport the team to away matches in his much-abused panel van and Natalie sewed everything from purses to fitted leather jackets for girls and young women to raise the cash for accommodation and transport, particularly if that year’s inter-provincial tournament was away from home.
“The Western Province committee used to make fun of us,” Natalie remembers.
“We didn’t always bring notes after our selling was over. Sometimes we brought small change and poured out silver and coppers on the table as well.”
The unvarying discipline of practise-practise-match was useful for Ellis in her teenage years because she had a dreamy side and was known to wander. Once she was found on the platform of Salt River station, holding the hands of a little boy, waiting to board a train. There was a restlessness about her that sometimes worried her parents.
During this time she also began to develop a social conscience, raiding Auntie Susan’s larder and throwing foodstuffs over the fence to help the poor and needy. “It was just tins of food and rice and that sort of thing,” she says nonchalantly. “I didn’t want anyone walking past to go hungry.”
If Cape Town Spurs were the local club of choice, Manchester United was the family’s adopted club further afield. The ups and downs of United’s season was monitored in the pages of the press and Ellis knows her United stuff, her Alex Stepney from her Jimmy Greenhoff, her Norman Whiteside from her Ryan Giggs.
“I was inspired by Bryan Robson, the kind of box-to-box midfielder I wanted to be when I changed from being a striker,” says Ellis. “So when I’d been at Celtic for a couple of years and was beginning to take more responsibility, his style and leadership became really important to me. He did the dirty work and wore his heart on his sleeve — I liked that.”
When her playing days were over Ellis became fascinated by another Manchester United legend, Sir Alex Ferguson. The former gaffer’s man-management skills and peerless ability to phase out ageing players without compromising a winning combination were lessons she took to heart.
She read Ferguson’s book and tried to apply his mantras, particularly when she finally took over the reins of the national coaching job from Vera Pauw in 2018 after being in an acting capacity for two years.
Her job is slightly less glamorous than Ferguson’s, concerned as it is with monitoring the form of her players’ abroad and managing the perpetual juggling act of seeing to it that visas are applied for in time and passports up-to-date.
Nuisances aside, Ellis wouldn’t change coaching https://mg.co.za/tag/banyana-banyana/ (she was a national player when their nickname was briefly “Bafazi Bafazi”) for anything in the world.
Since qualifying for the World Cup by beating Morocco 2-1 in Morocco in the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations final in mid-year, they’ve embarked on a none-too-successful series of friendlies and the run-in to next year’s World Cup is going to be logistically and emotionally challenging.
Banyana Banyana will be hoping to reverse their two home losses against Brazil at home a month ago when they play Australia in a friendly in London on Saturday, and through the second half of October and into November she’ll be in Australasia for the draw for next year’s World Cup.
Banyana might be based in Hamilton, New Zealand, or Adelaide, Australia, but Ellis doesn’t really mind where they end up. She’s still in “pinch-yourself” territory, a far cry from Greef and Westminster streets where she served her apprenticeship all those years ago.
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