The rain hammered down on Maputo, as if in protest, the night the Sacred Monster died. It squalled in from the dark and rough waters of the Indian Ocean, on gusts of wind, as Mozambique mourned. It should have been gentle rain, like tears in the night, but Mario Coluna would have appreciated this mighty show of natural force over the land of his birth; after all, it was natural power and uncanny force, born in Africa, that drove the Sacred Monster to a hallowed place in world football.
Coluna could hold any football crowd in the palm of his hand; outwit any opposition in his head and launch rockets with his boots. His explosive acceleration and body strength often overpowered the world’s finest players.
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On this night, February 25, after a heart attack, Coluna lay in peace at a Maputo hospital close to the streets where he learnt the game with his father’s socks tied into a ball. He was 78, 44 years since he stopped playing, and remains one of the most determined and skilful Africans ever to lace up a pair of football boots. In this age of hyperbole, peopled by overpaid and overrated players; Coluna was a man who wore modestly the word great. His country gave him a state funeral on February 28 and declared it a public holiday.
“It is not easy to say goodbye to someone whose life was among the greatest,” Luis Filipe Viera, the president of Benfica, told the club’s official website.
“Someone whose life path is unique and whose legacy will endure far beyond him. It is said that we are born equal. Untrue! Coluna was born different, for the better, much better.”
The Portuguese journalists called him the Sacred Monster—O Monstro Sagrado—because he was both terrifying and beautiful with the ball at his feet. He helped Benfica win 10 league titles and the European Cup twice; scoring in the victories over Barcelona in 1961 and Real Madrid the following year.
The win to retain the trophy, in Amsterdam in 1962, was as much an African triumph as a European one. In goal was Alberto da Costa Pereira, from Nacala in Mozambique, the captain Jose Aguas, born in Lobito, Angola, along with Coluna and Eusebio from Maputo. Players born and bred in Africa had a hand in all five goals as Benfica came back from 2-0 down to win 5-3.
On that May evening, as Coluna smashed in a goal from 25 yards to make it 4-3, hundreds of his countrymen were listening, also far from home. In the camps in the bush of southern Tanzania, hundreds of guerrilla fighters for FRELIMO—the newly formed liberation movement for Mozambique—crowded around the radio. One of them was founder member and future president Joaquim Chissano.
“We were divided. Some of us felt Coluna was bringing glory to our country, Mozambique. Others thought he was bringing glory to our colonizers, Portugal,” says Chissano at his Maputo home, the day after Coluna died.
“He was a true leader, he was always more concerned how the team was playing rather than how he was playing. When he retired, he brought his skills back to Mozambique to help build the game here. He was truly a great man.”
Coluna played for Benfica from 1954 to 1970 and when he retired Lev Yashin, Bobby Moore, the World Cup winning captain of England, Bobby Charlton, Uwe Seeler, George Best and Denis Law played at his testimonial in Lisbon.
Coluna was born in Maputo to a Mozambique mother and Portuguese father. His father was a goalkeeper and football fanatic, who died in the stands of a heart attack while watching the club he helped to found, now known as Desportivo de Maputo. Coluna’s precocious talent shone at Desportivo and Benfica scouts spotted him and flew him to Lisbon. He played 677 times, scoring 150 goals, for Benfica. In 1966, he captained one of the greatest sides ever to play for Portugal. They called them the Magricos—the magicians—and among them were four players from Mozambique: Coluna; Eusebio; Vicente and Hilario. This talented team should have been world champions, but suffered when the semi-final was switched, at the last minute, from Liverpool to London. The Portuguese emerged exhausted from an overnight train journey and lost 2-1 to England, the eventual winners.
I was in Maputo the night the great man died. It was almost five years to the day since I was privileged to be invited into his quiet Maputo home for an interview. He was looking frail then, but I was struck by the sure-footed confidence of an athlete. I was also struck by his gentlemanly demeanor and piercing blue eyes that would smile and then flash a steely glint; just to let you know that if you faced him on a football field you wouldn’t stand a chance.
Coluna told me he played football when men were men and referees were lenient. He rolled up his trouser leg to show me an ugly criss-cross scar—a painful souvenir of a crunching tackle in Rome in the 1960s that hastened the end of his career. The defender didn’t even get a caution.
Even though they drew the crowds, the players then were paid a pittance. Coluna, a handsome gentleman, who always wore a debonair pencil moustache, would these days have made a fortune from modeling clothes.
The top players of today earn more in a month than Coluna earned in his entire career. Coluna eked out his final years on a Benfica pension, but was never bitter.
“If players are making money for the football clubs, by getting fans through the turnstiles, why shouldn’t they get good money?” Coluna asked me on that hot February afternoon in Maputo.
Money was never the spur for Coluna. In 1975, when many of his talented generation, like Pele and Franz Beckenbauer, headed to New York for the riches of the new National American Soccer League, Coluna went home. He coached Text Chimoio, a club in a small town near the border with Zimbabwe, to the first football championship of an independent Mozambique. Years later, he ran a football academy, became the head of the country’s football association as well as an MP. At the age of 74, Coluna was campaigning for Portugal to prepare in Mozambique for the 2010 World Cup over the border in South Africa, arguing that the countries shared climate and language.
Portugal ignored Coluna’s pleas and sadly the football world, to an extent, ignored his legacy and talent. I think it is a crime that the name Coluna is often forgotten in world lit by a mere mention of the name Eusebio. Both players carried the banner for African football in Europe; only one returned.
Even sadder is that, in the space of a month, both African legends have gone. Television money and the globalized game mean we will see the like of their talent again, but few African geniuses will shine so brightly and labor so hard, for so little. When African footballers everywhere lace up their boots they should think of two names for inspiration: Coluna and Eusebio, two legends, who dared to dream, from Maputo, Mozambique.

A Storm To Mourn  The Sacred Monster

On May 2, it will be exactly half a century since a bunch of highly talented African footballers led Portuguese giants Benfica in the thrashing of Real Madrid 5-3 to retain the European Cup.
It was a dynamic team with an African heart. The captain was from Angola, the goalkeeper, midfield general and striker were all from Mozambique. Arguably, the most talented of all, nicknamed The Sacred Monster, was a midfield genius who had fought his way up from the streets of Maputo. Another of the players rejoiced in the name, The Black Panther. A dream for an advertising copywriter or a public relations executive, surely?
In June, it will be two years since the FIFA World Cup kicked off in South Africa. Since then, there has been a lot of talk about how Africa could sell itself, its football and folklore. After all, the football fans of the continent appear to buy enthusiastically into the plastic razzmatazz around European football, with its endless programs and promos on satellite TV. At football grounds across Europe, there are statues and pictures of the famed players of the past, many of whom may not have even made it into the Benfica team that mauled Real Madrid in 1962.
<div id="attachment_690" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-690" class="size-large wp-image-690" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DSC00350-1024x768.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="356" />Captain José Águas and Mário Coluna celebrate beating Barcelona in 1962</div>
The question is: why doesn’t Africa celebrate its heroes and rich history with such vigor?
Now, any advertising wizard worth their salt, with a yen to market African football, could do a lot worse than start with the story of the four African musketeers of Benfica in 1962. What a quartet they were: José Águas, the captain, was born and bred in Luanda; goalkeeper Alberto da Costa Pereira was born in the tiny Mozambique port of Nacala and learned his football at Ferroviario in Maputo; Eusébio—The Black Panther—dribbled his way through the dust of the streets of Maputo to an international career with Portugal, scoring 733 goals in 745 competitive games.
Last, but certainly not least, the tough and intelligent midfield schemer, Mário Coluna. Like Eusébio, Coluna learned to fake, dribble, trap and pass on a patch of sand in the Maputo township of Mafalala—a piece of ground that survives until this day and is still full of barefoot youngsters kicking a ball. I can almost hear an advertising executive thinking about this one.
A Portuguese sports journalist dubbed Coluna ‘O Monstro Sagrado’—The Sacred Monster—because he said the player was both terrifying and beautiful. Surely, only a Latin romantic, a journalist to boot, could have come up with a name as evocative.
Coluna, who had the sleek and robust physique of a light-heavyweight boxer, scored one and laid on another on the night Benfica trounced Real Madrid in Amsterdam. He outwitted Real, who had legends Puskás and Di Stéfano in their side. The year before, Coluna had scored with a blinding long-range volley as Benfica beat Barcelona 3-2, in Bern, to win the cup for the first time. Coluna celebrated, stripped to his waist, with trophy in hand, alongside his captain and fellow African, Águas. It is a picture that hangs in pride of place on the wall of his Maputo home to this day.
In the prime of his career, Coluna went on to lead the famous Magricios, considered to be one of Portugal’s finest teams, to the 1966 World Cup in England. In that famous team were two more men from Mozambique, Vicente and Hilário. In those days, colonial Portugal saw Mozambique and Angola as its overseas provinces and players from these countries were considered Portuguese. All were African right down to their boots.
Eusébio was top scorer in the tournament, with nine goals. Arguably, Portugal should have won the World Cup for the first time in their history in 1966. The team suffered through a touch of home town favoritism from the organizers. The semi-final against England was supposed to have been played in Liverpool, but was switched by the English organizers to Wembley in London at the last minute—despite the fact that it had been agreed it was unfair to allow the home country to play all of its games at the national stadium. It meant Portugal had to travel down by train overnight.
“We didn’t get any sleep on the train. We were so tired when we got to London, we could hardly play,” Coluna once told me in the suburbs of Maputo.
Despite this, England won by a 2-1 whisker, with Eusébio scoring a penalty in reply.  Just imagine the indignation and weeks of headlines if a similar trick had been pulled in 2010.
Which brings me back to my point; when I read the other week that Eusébio had been ill in hospital in Lisbon, it occurred to me how little we hear of these former legends, while the television in the corner prattles on about other players not fit to lace their boots.
All of the Africans mentioned above made it when football was a game for men-of-men—hard men-of-men, for that matter. Coluna, who played 677 times for Benfica, showed me a huge, ugly scar below his right knee, a souvenir of a night in Rome in 1968 when an Italian defender crushed his ligaments. The referee didn’t even caution the defender, such was the violence of the game in those days.
“The doctor said I would never play again, but I knew better,” Coluna told me.
On top of that, most of these African soccer heroes lived lives steeped in the game. Coluna used to pinch his dad’s socks to make a ball to kick around the Maputo streets. His father, shopkeeper José Mário Esteves Coluna, was a goalkeeper and founder of Coluna’s team, Desportivo de Maputo. He died, from a heart attack, while watching his beloved club in 1959.
Coluna came back to Mozambique in 1975 and coached a small town club, Textafrica in Chimoio, for the country’s first ever championship in the newly independent nation. He served with distinction as a parliamentarian and football administrator. Benfica still sends him a pension in euros.
My point is that African footballers like these should be celebrated by the continent as a way to market the game and encourage the youth of the continent to excel in it. Their names and deeds should be used in advertisements, splashed over posters and plastered on the sides of buses.  Statues should be built and their names known the length and breadth of the continent.
When you have a compelling human interest story attached to a name like The Sacred Monster or Black Panther, who needs an advertising copywriter to write a catchy slogan to market the game?

Tag: Mario Coluna

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