Bafana Bafana’s 5-0 drubbing by world champions France was a frank and humble reminder of where our football is and where it has been for the past 20 years.
You may ask how we got to this low point, but the signs have been there and the latest result comes as no surprise.
If it weren’t for our late president Nelson Mandela helping us win the right to host the 2010 Fifa World Cup, Bafana’s last appearance at the global showpiece would have been 20 years ago.
The last time our team qualified for the World Cup without anyone’s help was in 2002, and that was also the last time we had a competitive Bafana squad which had more than half of its players plying their trade overseas at some of the world’s great football clubs.
The team beatenby France had 20 locally-based players, with only strikers Fagrie Lakay (Pyramids FC, Egypt), Bongokuhle Hlongwane (Minnesota United, US) and Lyle Foster (Westerlo, Belgium) with their careers elsewhere.
Bafana coach Hugo Broos expected nothing more than what we got and will land back home on Thursday hoping his team learned something. But we’ve seen this movie before with many other top-class coaches at Bafana’s helm.
It’s never been any of the previous Bafana coaches’ fault that our standard is so low. It shouldn’t start with Bafana to develop players for the international stage.
The 23-year-old Kylian Mbappe, who was sensational against Bafana, helping himself to a brilliant brace, is a product of a well-oiled French football development programme that has helped them win two Fifa World Cup tournaments, including the last one in Russia in 2018.
Broos thought playing against France might help speed up our process of climbing the ladder. But the reality is that football doesn’t work like that. Like a baby, you first need to crawl before you stand, let alone run.
The last programme we heard touted by the visionless SA Football Association (Safa) suits was called Vision 2022. All it has produced is endless misery , with the team failing to qualify for the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) and the World Cup in Qatar later this year — the years in which it should have come to fruition.
But as I’ve highlighted before in this space, our performance on the pitch mirrors exactly the sort of the chaos happening behind the scenes at administration level. As long we have people who continue to promote their personal agendas through sport and our national teams, we’ll never come close to matching the likes of France on the world stage.
Our team, which was once ranked in the world’s top 20 after winning the Afcon in 1996, has been hovering around 70 in recent years — meaning we’re not among the top, second or even the third tier of world football.
Broos thought playing against France might help speed up our process of climbing the ladder. But the reality is that football doesn’t work like that. Like a baby, you first need to crawl before you stand, let alone run.
Broos is trying his best to build a team for the future but we have to admit he’s got poor-quality material. It is not for the Belgian’s lack of trying. Every South African has to admit that we’ve wasted two decades not developing our footballers properly and it may take much longer than we hope to return to where we were in the mid 1990s.
Tuesday’s game again demonstrated that our players are too average to grasp that you can’t replicate what you do in our pedestrian domestic league when you’re up against the world champions and a team ranked third in the world.
A look at the match stats shows one shot on target out of three for Bafana against the French team’s 14 on target out of 25 attempts. That tells you we’re a team very much inclined to giving our opponents chances to punish us, while we can’t create enough chances of our own.
A second key stat from the game is that in terms of ball possession, we were not far off with 42%. But in international football it is what you do with ball, rather than having it most of the time, that matters.
France completing 590 passes out of 661 versus our 364 out of 431 was key to the humiliating scoreline which equalled the highest defeat we’ve suffered. Brazil beat us 5-0 in a friendly in Johannesburg in March 2014, in what was Bafana skipper and goalkeeper Ronwen Williams’s debut.
You can’t be so generous at international level and then expect to qualify for international events such as the World Cup.
On Friday we’ll once again be keen spectators when the 32 teams that will feature in the World Cup in Qatar later this year are drawn against each other. It will be the third time running since we last appeared as hosts in 2010 that we do this.
At the rate we are going there’s no guarantee we’ll qualify for the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico in 2026, despite the continent being allocated nine spots in a tournament expanded to 48 teams.
Broos’s mission, which is commendable, is that by the time we start qualification for 2026 World Cup Bafana is among the top 10 nations on the continent.
If we do manage to qualify for next year’s Afcon in Ivory Coast and do well, by the time the Caf’s 2026 Fifa World Cup qualification draw is made we will be included among the top spots, avoiding the continent’s top guns.
It’s a tough mission, given that our footballers are neither improving nor playing in the world’s best leagues. PSL football has proved time and again that it does nothing to improve our players.
There’s a lot of unjustified praising of our players for the mediocrity they produce week in and week out. So it’s no wonder top European clubs are no longer interested in them.
It doesn’t help that the economic situation in the world is getting worse each day, affecting player movement. This situation demands that we start getting serious about how we develop our players at home.
It also doesn’t help that Safa and the PSL are not in sync, in terms of putting the nation’s interests first when it comes to developing our future Bafana stars.
Part of the bigger problem is that at both PSL and Safa level there’s been no change of leadership for close to three decades now. The suits who have been ruining our football may really be tired now and we can’t emphasise enough the need to bring in new blood in both organisations.
The sooner we have a strong Safa, which can control what the PSL does, the better. But I can tell you for free that the likelihood of that happening any time soon is zero.
That, unfortunately, is the reason you’ll still hear of Bafana coaches like Broos being locked out of PSL matches. It says a lot about the stinking mess that our football administrators have been brewing for years.
And that’s the reason Tuesday’s Bafana result shouldn’t surprise us. What we should pray for is that Broos remains interested and committed to his job, despite having to contend with all the charlatans around him.
The coach, who celebrates his 70th birthday on April 10, remains our great hope.
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