Soccer

Committee to make a call on Baxter

26 November 2017 - 00:00 By SAZI HADEBE

Stuart Baxter's future as Bafana Bafana head coach is now in the hands of the SA Football Association's (Safa) technical committee whose recommendation - after the Briton's dismal failure to take Bafana Bafana to next year's World Cup in Russia - will determine whether he stays or is fired.
The impact of Bafana's latest setback was magnified this week when Fifa downgraded the national side to 81st in its world rankings. Bafana also dropped to 18th in Africa.
Safa chief executive Dennis Mumble this week reiterated what Baxter has been saying all along, that the association didn't stipulate any mandate for him when he signed a five-year contract with the association in June.
The question of the mandate or no mandate, Mumble added, will not feature when the technical committee makes its call on the future of the embattled coach."If the technical committee recommend that we fire the coach, we'll have to consider that because it makes no sense that if you have the technical committee that sincerely feels that we are never going to go anywhere with the coach, we ignore that," he said.
"Clearly, the association will have to take it seriously. We can't ignore that because we are not the technicians, they are. That's why we appointed them to advise us appropriately. But we don't start from the standpoint that we hired the coach for seven months.
"We hired the coach based on the conditions that we find ourselves in and the conditions under which he serves. There are a number of things that I disagree with him on and I have made them very public.
"It's not true that we don't have the structures and that's where I disagree with the coach. But that doesn't give reason to fire him. I don't know what possessed him to say that. I made it very clear to him that I'm not happy with his utterances on that."
Should Safa opt to sack Baxter, a fight over his compensation for the remainder of his contract will surely ensue. Though there was no one available to confirm his salary this week, it is estimated that he takes home between R60,0000 and R80,0000 a month...

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