SAZI HADEBE | Safa needs people with football, not trips around the world, at heart

Perhaps it was good I was preoccupied and didn’t have time to worry too much about what was happening with Bafana Bafana at the weekend.

My cellphone added some spice when it collapsed on me on Saturday evening, shutting me off from the world until I had it fixed on Monday morning.

Sunday, at about 8pm, when I managed to sit in front of a television to catch up on the day’s news, my eyes, mind and everything else fixed on one thing: whether the national team had managed to get the point they needed against Sudan to qualify for next year’s Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) in Cameroon.

To say my fears were confirmed would be an understatement. The reason no one had bothered to talk to me about Bafana until then became apparent. They had lost to the low-ranked Sudanese not by one, but two goals to nil.

Shocking? Perhaps not.

Results such as this will be with us for a long time, perhaps decades. My colleague, David Isaacson, hit the nail on the head in his Sunday Times Daily column, Punt Intended, on Wednesday: it’s not about who’s coaching the team, but the lack of implementation of a proper development programme for our players, who are as capable and talented as everyone in the world, but badly prepared.

And that can only mean one thing: the South African Football Association (Safa) has failed for more than two decades to develop and produce footballers capable of taking on the world — a world that is full of upstarts such as Sudan, who are also keen to take their place among the best on the continent and in the world.

SA last had joy when Bafana won the Afcon in 1996, less than five years after we were readmitted to international football and played our first match on July 7 1992. From 2000 it’s been downhill, with many tragedies and disasters occurring one after the other, irrespective of who has been at the team’s helm.

Let’s start with Bafana’s record in the Afcon finals since 2000, the year in which they were knocked out in the quarterfinals after failing in the final to defend their crown in Egypt in 1998.  

There have been 10 Afcon finals since 2000. In three of them, including the 2019 contest, and of those, three times, including in 2019, Bafana were knocked out in the last eight. 

Bafana have been bombed out in the first round on four occasions, with the 2006 final in Egypt taking the cake.

Coached by the esteemed, late Ted Dumitru, who had won four league titles in the Premier Soccer League (PSL) by the time he ascended to Bafana’s throne, his team came back with their tails firmly between their legs after failing to score a single goal after 2-0 defeats against Guinea and Tunisia, and a 1-0 loss to Zambia.

Bafana players watched the other three Afcon finals (2010, the year SA hosted the Fifa World Cup, 2012 and 2017) on their couches at home like everyone else after they they’d failed to qualify, just as they did on Sunday.

As far as the World Cup is concerned, the national team is far from being counted among potential qualifiers.

Bafana qualified for the World Cup in 1998 and 2002. In 2010 they wrote one of their most embarrassing scripts — being the first hosts to be first-round casualties. They did the same in 1998 and 2002, but as new entrants in world football we were happy to forget and forgive them.

Why this background? Simply to provide context with which to view Sunday’s result against Sudan and illustrate why misery may well continue to be ours for decades to come.

The bottom line is that our football authorities at Safa don’t give a damn about what Bafana or any of our national teams do on the field. What they care about is their positions, which give them licence to tour the world at the expense of Safa, the Confederation of African Football (Caf) and Fifa.

Since our defeat on Sunday, and as always, many people, including those we call football analysts, are calling for coach Molefi Ntseki’s head. Very few have been bold enough to call for the same fate for Safa president Danny Jordaan, who’s been around the organisation for as long as anyone can remember.

Safa is very good at coming up with programmes, but like our government is exceptionally bad at implementing anything it puts on paper. 

Since 2012 the association has been telling everyone who cares to listen about its Vision 2022, yet when you look back at what has been achieved in the past eight years or so you see little progress, if any.

I’m sure someone at Safa is busy, as I write this, putting final touches to yet another programme it will be introducing next year which will detail what SA football needs to do in the next 10 years after 2022. 

But without removing those who fail to implement their own programmes, our football will remain stuck or get worse.

It does not need another programme. It needs a complete overhaul in administration. People with a football brain, heart, business acumen and integrity must be given a chance to run our football.

Without that we may as well forget about ever seeing a change of fortune on the pitch.