By refusing to accept Stuart Baxter’s resignation and steadfastly dispelling any notion that the beleaguered coach might be forced to step down, the South African Football Association (Safa) is at last positing itself as an organisation that won’t be swayed by popular sentiment but by long-term principles and objectives whose overall aim is to find solutions to the current problems and chart the way forward.
Safa CEO Raymond Hack believes that, for the first time since problems of maladministration surfaced a few years ago, the football organisation has to go back to basics and do some self-assessing. After the 3-1 loss to Burkina Faso at the weekend that ended the country’s chances of qualifying for next year’s World Cup, he warns against pointing fingers and making wild statements that will spur only short-term solutions.
”Everybody should share responsibility; we should have seen and identified and tried to remedy the problems. The warning lights were there, we should not put blame on a, b, c … If we want to produce a winning team we have to stop blaming each other, we all have to get together and say how do we overcome and move forward. We still have an opportunity to qualify for the African Nations Cup and reintroduce pride in our national team,” says Hack.
Given what South African football achieved both at club and country level 10 years ago — Orlando Pirates winning the continental cup and Bafana Bafana achieving the feat a year later when they won the African Nations Cup — when did the controlling body veer off the path and why?
Pundits believed that the awarding of the 2010 World Cup to South Africa would galvanise and force everybody at head office to focus. However, instead of Safa building on Fifa’s faith and creating new confidence, the number of sponsors continues to dwindle and potential new ones have been scared off.
Zola Dunywa, Safa director of football development, says his bosses constantly ”tell me that there is no money for development” — although Safa’s core mandate is to develop and promote football in the country.
This is not something new; it was the climate that existed when Baxter came on board. Many coaches before him worked under these conditions, and the difference is that Safa could ignore these problems because the national team kept on qualifying.
With the resources South Africa boasts, it should be a walk in the park for our national team to qualify. Why then has Baxter’s team failed?
A cause lies in the recent results of those who might some day wear the Bafana Bafana jersey. Last year, our youth teams lost to Lesotho — a country ranked outside the top 100 by Fifa — in the continental championships. There is a worrying lack of new talent coming through.
Also, it now seems that many players lack the necessary incentive to perform well. The players need to be made to feel that it is an honour and privilege to don the national colours.
Emmanuel Maradas, a respected former journalist, argues that part of South Africa’s problem is that ”they are constantly competing against opposition not in their league and this inevitably drags their standards down. South Africa should be competing in the same league now as England, Brazil and most of the European and South American countries. My concern for South Africa is that they don’t seem to produce players like Phil Masinga, Neil Tovey, Shoes Moshoeu and Mark Fish, who had the passion and hunger.
”The domestic league is not producing this type of player. The loss in Burkina Faso is not a defeat, it is a humiliation for a country that has vast resources like South Africa. If they don’t start working now to prepare, 2010 will be a disaster.”
Hack concurs: ”The basic issue everybody is missing is that it seems that our national team has to reacquire the belief to win. You can have the best eleven in the world but if you don’t have the individuals who want to fight, who want to go out there and put everything on the line …
”We have to find the passion in all our players, to have players walking on to the field thinking that they are eight foot high and are on top of the world. Maybe our players don’t have the will to win any more.”
Hack is, however, mindful that time may not be on Safa’s side and has boldly put a time frame to what is needed to turn around the situation. ”By December, we need to have produced a car that is roadworthy, although it may not be ready to win at Kyalami yet.”
In modern times France, Mexico and now South Africa are the only countries that have failed to qualify for the World Cup after being granted the right to host the next tournament. The question is, will South Africa rise to the challenge?
When France failed twice to qualify for the World Cup, after a great run in the Eighties in continental championships, football administrators formulated a way forward. They set up specialised training facilities at Clairfontaine geared towards preparing for 1998. Primarily the institutions were used to produce a continual stream of young players, inclulding Arsenal’s Thierry Henry.
So far the 2010 World Cup has failed to inspire football administrators to develop structures that would create the necessary momentum. The failure to qualify for the World Cup may, as Hack suggests, be just the catalyst football administrators needed to get their house in order.