You’d think if you disappeared for a while, like I did for three weeks, that by the time you came back your nightmare would be over. But alas, there’s no chance of that if you’re talking about the ghost that is SA football.
Whether amateur, international or professional, the problems seem to be the same year in and year out. I do feel for the country’s supporters, who are yearning for something akin to those early years after readmission to the international fold, when things looked so bright for our football on and off the field.
These days there’s not much winning on the field and our football administration, at SA Football Association (Safa) and Premier Soccer League (PSL) levels, leaves a lot to be desired.
The impact of our ill-functioning administration could be seen in Tokyo in the past two weeks — our under-23 team returned carrying a big zero on their back from their third appearance at the Olympic Games.
No sane soul was surprised by the team’s results, but the scarier part is that our administration will see nothing wrong with how they do things or the outcome of their sloppiness. What they’ll do, as always after tournament failures, is put their heads in the sand and hope that by the time they emerge the foul smell of their rancid administration will have disappeared.
What you’re likely to see from Safa are useless statements, such as the one sent out this week mourning the non-renewal of an SABC broadcasting contract, as if the public broadcaster has to account to the association for every action it takes regarding the future of its employees.
If you’re waiting for anything substantial on how to avoid a repeat of what happened in Tokyo, you’re wasting your time. Which is a pity because Safa remains the main organisation responsible for unearthing and nurturing the talent we may have in our country.
There will be lots of excuses for Notoane’s team’s failure, chief among them being that these Olympics had to be postponed because of Covid-19. We should, however, tell those making that excuse that no country among the 15 that were with Notoane’s team in Tokyo had it easy.
But when reviewing what happened with the under-23 team in Tokyo we would be making a mistake if we started with what happened on the field. The signs were there from the word go that this team would struggle and it would be a miracle if they got one victory out their group, one which produced semi-finalists in Mexico and Japan.
France, a team David Notoane’s players squandered numerous chances against to beat before going down to them 4-3, were also among the first-round casualties.
For teams such as France, failure to perform in an Olympic tournament may not have much bearing on the senior national team, but for Bafana Bafana it’s a huge setback.
Notoane’s team was nowhere near the standard set by the Sydney 2000 Olympic team of Shakes Mashaba, which featured the likes of Siyabonga Nomvethe, Benni McCarthy, Stanton Fredericks, Emile Baron, Matthew Booth, Quinton Fortune, Fabian McCarthy, David Kannemeyer, Jabu Mahlangu, Abram Nteo and Delron Buckley, and who immediately graduated to the senior national team.
The 2000 team is also the only one which managed a victory at the Olympics, their sensational 3-1 thumping of Brazil demonstrating the talent we have in our country.
Players like Nomvethe went on to help SA qualify for the 2002 Fifa World Cup in Korea/Japan, the last time SA had a team that actually qualified for the global showpiece.
There will be lots of excuses for Notoane’s failure, chief among them being that these Olympics had to be postponed because of Covid-19. And it didn’t help that by the time they were staged a year later the pandemic was still very much part of our lives.
We should, however, tell those making that excuse that no country among the 15 that were with Notoane’s team in Tokyo had it easy. It was how each of them and their football associations responded to the challenges of the pandemic that made the difference and made teams look better in these trying times.
We’re in this situation because we have an association that never casts its eye beyond the now. Everyone will remember the wasted opportunities with the under-23s when Broos’s team fails to make it to Qatar.
Safa made a point of using the pandemic to hide its inefficiency, organising less than five preparation games for Notoane’s team since they qualified for the Games in late November 2019.
It didn’t help that Notoane was careful not voice his displeasure at how poorly his team was being supported by the Safa hierarchy ahead of the Games. His politeness, shielding and hiding a lot of shenanigans behind the scenes, didn’t help this team.
Twenty-one years on no-one has forgotten the names of the players in the 2000 Olympics, but Notoane’s men will be lucky if anyone remembers their names beyond this year.
And as we try to digest that, think of new Bafana Bafana coach Hugo Broos, who had high hopes of finding many players in Notoane’s team to promote to Bafana with the 2022 World Cup qualification looming in September.
We’re in this situation because we have an association that never casts its eye beyond the now. Everyone will remember the wasted opportunities with the under-23s when Broos’s team fails to make it to Qatar.
The under-23s failure came just a few months after Bafana, under former coach Molefi Ntseki, missed booking a spot in next year’s Africa Cup of Nations.
Amazingly, the suits at Safa will keep plodding on, hoping no-one will highlight their failures. Some, including Safa president Danny Jordaan, will soon be campaigning to be re-elected to their cushy positions at the associations’ congress next year, despite the national teams’ recent failures.
If by sheer luck Broos’s team manages to qualify for Qatar, the Safa suits will be the first to tell the world it was because of their unheralded efforts in supporting the team and that they therefore deserve more time to gaze at their navels in the association’s shiny offices in Nasrec.
If it were up to me, I would send them all packing, no matter what happens with the World Cup qualification. I have seen and had enough of these people killing our game while masquerading as football administrators.
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