Pienaar given perspective by township upbringing

Steven Pienaar has endured enough in life, in football, to treat triumph and disaster just the same. The moment his career nearly finished before it had started at Ajax, his ostracism at Borussia Dortmund, his anguish at leaving Everton, his travails at Tottenham: all are met with a sanguine equanimity, the sort of perspective gleaned from a childhood spent in a Johannesburg township once described as a "death zone to keep the devil busy". Only one thing visibly embarrasses him, induces him to wince at the memory.

"I had only been with Everton for two days," he recalls. "We were in Los Angeles on a pre-season tour, and I was told you have to stand on a chair and sing, even if you don't want to. In front of the whole team, the whole room. I did a traditional South African song. It was really bad. Really bad." That experience was sufficiently scarring to stay with the 29-year-old. "When I first came here, [Peter] Crouch wanted me to do the same," he says. "I just told him I wouldn't do it."

Eleven months after the South African international acrimoniously exited Merseyside, after more than a year of refusing a new contract, his former manager David Moyes suggested Pienaar would not, exactly, find himself in a land of milk and honey. "Sometimes you find that a player suits a club and vice versa," the Scot said. "It all just fits, and when they move on they cannot recapture that." His words have proved prophetic.

Where Everton's Pienaar spent three and a half years proving himself an impish menace rich in imagination, the incarnation which has manifested itself at Spurs has proved ineffective, anaemic. When he has played, that is: a succession of injuries has restricted him to just 12 appearances for Harry Redknapp's side since his move last January.

Pienaar bristles, though, at the very suggestion he might have erred, either in leaving a city in which he admits he felt enormously comfortable or in choosing Spurs. "Regrets? No, not at all. Not at all," he says, eyes wide with surprise. "It has been a bumpy road, but hopefully I can make it a success. It was hard to leave Everton as a club, and Liverpool as a city. The people I had around me, the players, most of the supporters were very good to me, and I will always be grateful to them. But in life you have to make decisions. I made this one as a footballer and as a human being, and I don't have any regrets. Not at all."

It is an attitude that bears testament to where Pienaar has come from. He grew up fatherless in Westbury, on the dusty outskirts of Johannesburg, a place so lawless, so dangerous that he was not allowed to watch television on the sofa for fear of being struck by a stray bullet from the gangland turf wars raging outside.

Pienaar recalls being bruised by pellets from the "daisy guns" fired at him as a child, as his homeland seethed in apartheid's death throes, and Westbury's endemic violence has claimed the life of at least one friend.

By that stage, Pienaar had escaped, travelling 1,400km (875 miles) to Cape Town to play for Ajax's feeder team. Moves to the Netherlands, Germany and the Premier League followed. That does not mean, though, that it has been easy. In Amsterdam, he was sidelined for more than four months with nerve damage; at Dortmund, where he was signed as a replacement for the Arsenal-bound Tomas Rosicky, he found himself at a club drowning in a toxic mix of debt and high expectation.

"When I damaged my nerve, they said I'd never play again. I came back strong. I had a difficult spell at Dortmund, and I came back strong. Having been through all of that helps me appreciate the time I am on the field. I want to be part of this team and I want to show I did not come here by mistake. I have come back twice already. I will come back again."

There is no bitterness, no recrimination, and no fear that things will not work out. It is typical of Pienaar. Triumph and disaster: just the same. He may not have burst into song on arrival at White Hart Lane, but his beat goes on.

Steven Pienaar was speaking at Puma's launch of 10 African kits, designed by artists from different countries. He wears the Puma v1.11 speed boot.