Overshadowing Ronaldo

Phil Masinga: The Hardened Executioner of Inter

Written by: Chris McMenamy
Phil Masinga leaping through the air for a header playing for Leeds against Reading

Bariโ€™s unexpected promotion to Serie A in 1997 could have prompted a summer of panic buying, but they remained calm and frugal. They took advantage of the relatively new Bosman ruling to sign some free transfers and spent โ€˜realโ€™ money on only one player: Phil Masinga.

Masinga had left Leeds the previous summer for Swiss club St Gallen, having been rejected for an extended work permit to stay in England. But he departed Switzerland after only three months and spent the rest of 1996/97 at Salernitana in Italyโ€™s second tier, Serie B.

There must have been something about Masingaโ€™s four goals in sixteen games for the Salerno club that prompted Bari to part with almost a million euros for his signature. One of those goals came in a crucial survival clash with Castel di Sangro, the side that became famous for their meteoric rise from amateur football to Serie B. Allegedly, itโ€™s also thanks to Castel di Sangro that Masinga was joining Bari in Serie A rather than the second tier.

Bari hosted Castel di Sangro on the final day of the 1996/97 season, needing a win to guarantee promotion to Serie A. Thankfully for the Baresi, their opponents were already safe and had nothing to play for. In Joe McGinnisโ€™ book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, the American journalist followed the team around Italy all that season and claimed that he stumbled upon a meeting among players the night before the Bari game in which they discussed how they would fix the game for cash. Bari won 3-1 and the rest is very complicated history, including the Castel di Sangro president Gabriele Gravina rising to become the incumbent president of FIGC, the Italian FA. Moving on!

Masinga arrived at Bari as a back-up to Miguel Angel Guerrero and wonderkid Nicola Ventola but became a regular in the side partly thanks to the latterโ€™s injury, proving valuable to a side whose priority was survival. Never the most aesthetically pleasing attacker, Masinga made up for it with his tenacity and ability to occupy defenders but, crucially, also for his ability to score goals despite lacking what most would consider elite technique.

Life in Serie A started badly for Masinga. After debuting in an opening day defeat to Parma, he was sent off for wild challenges in his next two appearances against Fiorentina and Lazio. Bari coach Eugenio Fascetti stuck by his new striker and started him in a 5-0 defeat to Juventus, in which he managed to get through an hour without being sent off.

Bari had four points after six games, during which Masinga had been sent off twice and scored no goals. Then came an away trip to Empoli and yet another start for the โ€˜expensiveโ€™ Masinga in a 3-2 win, in which he scored twice. Early in the second half, Empoliโ€™s Pietro Fusco attempted to clear the ball upfield but Masinga charged the clearance down and smashed the ball past the โ€˜keeper from the edge of the box with his second touch. His second was a tidy finish and he kicked on from there, scoring in a 2-1 win against Vicenza right before a trip to San Siro to face Inter on 18th January 1998.

Bari might have felt a thrill in dropping the best part of a million euros on Masinga, but that was nothing compared to Inter, who had paid Barcelona a mere โ‚ฌ25m for Ronaldo in the same window. O Fenomeno should have run riot against this newly-promoted Bari side like he had done against the likes of Milan, Fiorentina, and Lazio while scoring nine times in thirteen games, but it was to be Phil Masingaโ€™s day.

If momentum graphs had existed back then this gameโ€™s would have resembled the Alpsโ€™ snow-capped peaks that you can see from the north of Milan. Ronaldo bobbed and weaved between Bari defenders time after time but couldnโ€™t beat Francesco Mancini in the away goal, no matter how many times he tried.

With just over ten minutes remaining, a rare Bari attack saw Sergio Volpi cross into the Inter box and Masinga score a trademark goal: scrappy, but effective. He headed the ball down into the prone torso of Inter โ€˜keeper Gianluca Pagliuca, who spilled it behind him and onto the goal-line, allowing Masinga to poke the rebound into the net. It was a goal borne of perseverance and awareness. Pagliuca ran off to the linesman crying that Masinga had kicked it out of his hands. He hadnโ€™t. And it proved enough for a famous Bari win at San Siro.

He finished that season as Bariโ€™s top goalscorer with nine, helping them to a respectable 11th-place finish in Serie A. He scored the only goal in a win against Milan in April 1998, a bullet header in the 81st minute. A month later, Bari faced title-chasing Inter on the penultimate day of the season. Inter led until the 86th minute when Ventola scored to equalise, before Masinga scored the winner. Again. It was his last goal of the season and sealed Bariโ€™s place in the top flight while also handing the title to Juventus, like Mark Viduka scoring at Highbury in 2003 and handing the title to Manchester United.

Masinga cemented his cult hero status at Bari in his second season, scoring eleven times as they finished 10th. Two tap-ins at San Siro against Inter in November 1998 made it three wins in a row against one of the countryโ€™s giants. Another great goal came against Sampdoria when he held off a defender and controlled a looping header before slotting it in off the post from eighteen yards. Always physical, sometimes graceful. What made that goal even more impressive is that it came after Masinga had been injured for four weeks and hadnโ€™t trained prior to playing.

Bari fans adored him, adorning him with nicknames in the particularly strong Barese dialect, names which not even Google translate can decipher. The players waxed lyrical about his impact on the pitch and affable demeanour off it, as well as his dressing room presence being both serious and comical. Bari general secretary Piero Doronzo recalled Masinga phoning him to say he was taking an extra day off after international duty: “I told him, ‘Phil, look, Fascetti is really pissed off.’ He calmly replied, โ€˜No problem, Piero, because I’m pissed off too.โ€™โ€

1998/99 was as good as it got for Masinga in Italy as he spent the next two seasons in and out with serious injuries, scoring only four times in 27 appearances across both campaigns. Bari were relegated at the end of 2000/01, finishing seventeen points adrift at the bottom of Serie A.

Italian football magazine Rivista Undici described Masinga as the โ€˜totem of the Bari attack of the nineties and hardened executioner of Interโ€™. He might not have stood out at Leeds โ€” unless you saw his nine-minute hat-trick against Walsall or witnessed him bundle one in against Arsenal โ€” but against all odds he found a home away from home in a different one-club city whose team wear white.

Phil Masinga passed away in January 2019 at the age of 49. Not only was he a South Africa legend after scoring the goal that took them to their first ever World Cup in 1998, he is a name still revered in Bari to this day. The clubโ€™s ultras draped a banner outside the stadium after the announcement of Masingaโ€™s passing that simply read: โ€˜Low shot or chip, you made us scream GOAL! Ciao Phil.โ€™ His name lives on as a memory of a beloved side the likes of which Bari fans have longed for ever since. โฌข

(Photograph by John Giles, via Alamy)

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