How the country wishes for Bafana Bafana to transform from being South African sport’s sad story to its success story at the Africa Cup of Nations in Ivory Coast.
Probably the long-ailing national team, which has shown signs of life in Hugo Broos’s three-and-a-half-year tenure, and genuinely displayed a pulse at the Nations Cup, have their best chance in almost two decades to perform such a metamorphosis as they meet Cape Verde in Saturday’s quarterfinal.
The South Africans heroically shocked 2022 World Cup semi-finalists Morocco in Tuesday’s last 16 clash.
South African sport’s success story in 2023 saw the Women’s Proteas reach a T20 World Cup final, the men reaching the semifinals of the 50-over World Cup, Banyana Banyana becoming the first senior South African football side to reach a World Cup group stage and of course the Springboks winning the Rugby World Cup. Their compatriots’ exploits seem to have spurred Bafana at the start of 2024.
After the successes of the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations triumph (plus a final in 1998 and third place in 2000) and World Cup qualifications in 1998 and 2002, Bafana spiralled alarmingly into decline in the 2000s and 2010s. Mostly poor and short-sighted administration and lack of a well-conceived development plan, but also a strange decline post-democracy in organised schools football — a talent breeding ground in the 1970s and 1980s — was to blame.
As Afcon quarterfinal and then group stage exits were followed by failures to qualify, and the World Cup became an event to participate in only as hosts, negativity came to surround the national team. So call-ups often became seen as more of a distraction from paying club football, a schlep or an annoyance for players. In such an environment, with constant questions over players’ commitment levels, a demotivated side’s results sagged more and more.
Some improvement in the South African Football Association (Safa) and Premier Soccer League (PSL), clubs’ development and private academies after hosting the 2010 World Cup — though still not nearly enough — has breathed some signs of life into Bafana. They reached Nations Cup quarterfinals on home soil in 2013, in Egypt in 2019 and now in Ivory Coast, though these were still punctuated by failures to qualify for the tournament.
Bafana may very well lose. It would be a wonderful potential turning point for South African men’s football – if the administrators later capitalised on it correctly – if Bafana could win.
Finally, perhaps a little by fluke, partly because it established a requirement to hire a coach who had won a Nations Cup, Safa hit upon the brainwave of hiring Broos. It was something of a hit and hope rescue mission to substitute the lack of a clear development plan that could be executed.
Broos had won the Nations Cup with a young Cameroon side, with established veterans sidelined, in 2017. Safa wanted him to inject youth into Bafana, and see if that could work to restore the team to success. This coincided with improvements in academies in the 2010s, better schedules for long inactive junior national teams that saw some tournament qualifications and also some successes in coaching from grassroots to senior levels.
So some young players were emerging as Broos arrived. To his credit, the veteran coach, a football man steeped in knowledge who was a defender in Belgium’s famous squad that reached the 1986 World Cup semifinals, was brave selecting relative unknowns and had enough disregard for criticism to stick to his decisions.
His Bafana at the Nations Cup have more potential than the other two sides that reached quarterfinals in the past 11 years.
They face a Cape Verde side who, after a decade emerging as a force on the continent, won the group of death in Ivory Coast beating Ghana and Mozambique and drawing against Egypt. The islanders will feel they have as much right to a place in the semifinals as any of the other quarterfinalists.
Bafana may very well lose. It would be a wonderful potential turning point for South African men’s football — if the administrators later capitalised on it correctly — if Bafana could win.
Mamelodi Sundowns have led the way with their continental successes, and it’s no surprise Bafana’s core are sourced from that club. SuperSport United’s academy products, regularly plundered by Sundowns, have also played their part.
Football is the biggest sport in the country. Demographically it has historically been supported by and represents mostly black people, working class and poor people.
They have felt let down by the decline of their once glorious sport from its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, and of its national team. Springbok World Cup victories certainly can play a role-changing racial perceptions and lifting the national mood. Bafana reaching a first Nations Cup semifinal in 24 years — an extraordinarily long drought — and perhaps going even further, seems somehow necessary, if those brave men in Ivory Coast who stunned the Atlas Lions can just do it again on Tuesday.
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