Besart Berisha: everyone's arch enemy and the A-League’s greatest ever striker

As a general rule, Besart Berisha does not settle for second. He did not for Melbourne Victory in December 2016 when, having missed numerous chances to equal Archie Thompson’s all-time A-League scoring record of 90, used the half-time break to smash some chairs, a rubbish bin and a door “to relax a little bit”, before emerging to score a second-half winner.

He did not in 2011, when his brace helped Brisbane Roar to a 4-0 win and a 36th consecutive victory that broke a 74-year-old Australian sporting record. And he did not in 2018, when his remarkable overhead kick gave Victory an 89th-minute elimination-final win over Adelaide United.

Oddly, on Saturday night, Berisha was second, and it may equate to his most distinguished achievement yet.

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His 137th and 138th goals in Western United’s 4-1 win over Macarthur lifted past him Rod Brown’s 137 on the all-time Australian national league goal charts. He now sits only behind former Socceroos striker Damian Mori, whose record 240 goals have stood the test of time.

At 35, Berisha will be hard-pressed to find another 102 before retiring. But the beauty is that he does not have to, for the Kosovo-Albanian international has already whittled his way into the psyche of just about all who cross his path.

Those who enjoy cold hard statistics can cite Berisha’s four A-League championships, two premierships and one FFA Cup trophy. Or they could point to his two golden boots and near-permanent residence on the PFA’s team of the season.

They might also reference the fact he holds the record for the A-League’s fastest hat-trick (for Ange Postecoglou’s Brisbane Roar in 2011) or that he also has the most hat-tricks overall (equal to Jamie Maclaren’s five). In 2019-20, despite his age, he scored 19 goals for Western United – the same tally that earned him the golden boot in 2011-12 while with Brisbane and 2016-17 with Victory.

These are all key ingredients for a player regarded as the A-League’s greatest striker, but they are not all that make Berisha so.

It is, as ever, also about personality. It is about showboating and theatrics, a fondness for clutch moments that elicit nicknames like “big-game Bes”, and a capacity to conjure love and hate and all the emotions in between.

Berisha’s latest milestone is an apt ode to longevity almost a decade after his A-League debut for the Roar against Central Coast in 2011, which nearly did not happen at all.

“There was a moment where I wanted to break up the contract before I came to Brisbane,” he said early last year. “I was a bit nervous and scared. “My wife pushed me and said ‘no, we cannot do that’, and I’m so glad that my wife helped me with this decision to keep going with the trip.

“I am forever thankful. I thought I was just going to play for seven months and return back to Europe but I just fell in love, I felt home in Australia already in the first year. I wanted to continue here.”

Since then, every bit of Berisha’s being has proved this to be so. Each one of his clubs gets him all in, on the boil and steaming at both opponents and team-mates. He gives hell and relishes in its return, thrives on hostility and lives for away games.

Berisha does not so much rip hearts out, but removes them methodically much like that gory human sacrifice scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Millennials who watched that film as children may still be haunted from time to time. Not dissimilarly, Berisha would still occasionally visit the dreams of antagonists past and present. Pascal Bosschaart and just about every Perth Glory fan may fall into that category.

Such footballers operate at their best under hard-nosed managers. In that sense, Postecoglou, Kevin Muscat and Mark Rudan have been consummate facilitators.

“He’s got a likability factor as far as I am concerned,” Rudan said last season. “He is everyone’s arch enemy and I like that. The more people throw stones at myself or Bes or our club, it’s like kryptonite for us.”

There is a sense that, as the years roll on, the speed in diminishing. But the penchant for poaching is not, something Berisha attributes, at least in part, to the intelligence of teammate Alessandro Diamanti.

“I don’t need to talk to him, to shout at him. I know the ball will just come. I just need to do my runs, and that’s amazing,” Berisha said on Saturday. “Honestly, this is the way I felt at times in Brisbane with Thomas Broich.”

Such softly spoken words contribute to the walking contradiction of a man so approachable off the pitch and so incendiary on it that he is prone to pantomime characterisations. But the impetuous hot-headedness is in his blood, the blood of a boy who, with his parents, fled unrest in Kosovo for an alien upbringing in eastern Berlin.

“Friends have told me, ‘privately, I cannot imagine a better guy, a better man, a family man, but why are you such a different person on the pitch?’,” Berisha told the Guardian in 2013. “And I say, ‘it goes with my story’. The game is my life and I take it so seriously. Even at 14, I was so serious. I didn’t want to lose any game.”

Berisha does not like losing, but this sort of second place is to be cherished.