”There is a loud crack as Don Quixote charges the windmill, which he believes to be an adversial, but palpably vulnerable giant,” wrote Miguel de Cervantes in his immortalised account about the lantern-jawed, lanky knight in shining armour whose escapades have left millions chortling for centuries.
”Quixote’s lance sticks into a whirling sail, is whipped from his hands and is smashed to pieces as he is hurled, complete with horse, halfway across the length of an adjoining field.”
Crusty, inveterate veteran coach Ted Dumitru has done his fair share of tilting at windmills since succeeding the articulate Stuart Baxter at the helm of Bafana Bafana in November, breezily giving the impression that, under his obscure and often irrational tutelage, success at the current Africa Nations Cup in Egypt would be little more than a piece of cake.
And with a naive, but not inconsiderable, portion of the sporting media eagerly gulping information out of the palm of the Romanian-born coach’s hand, the impression was created that a magical and instant transformation in the fortunes of South Africa’s beleaguered national team was a formality.
Instead, the embarrassing 2-0 drubbing received by Bafana in their opening Afcon game in Alexandria on Sunday against an underestimated but greatly more attuned and cohesive Guinea provided ample evidence that matters have gone from bad to worse under Dumitru.
And, little wonder, if you examine some of the mind-boggling innovations introduced into the Bafana ranks by the outgoing Kaizer Chiefs’ coach, whose success at club level in South Africa has been intermingled with acts of erraticism, caustic criticsm of others of his ilk and tuning to a fine art an ability to shift blame for failure on to the shoulders of others.
Initially, it needs to be pointed out that Dumitru was appointed Bafana coach by a newly compiled South African Football Association (Safa) technical committee under a chairperson with no background or experience to suggest he was remotely equipped for the position.
That is the irrational manner in which Safa tends to operate, handing jobs to pals and giving little consideration to the ethos of merit selection.
Dumitru’s opening salvo was either thoughtless, meant to satisfy the whims of the masses or with other cynical designs as he attacked the ability and sometimes the integrity of Bafana’s overseas-based players — suggesting the cream of South African talent was right here on our doorstep.
He was going to concentrate on locally based players for his squad and this in essence was going to produce an amazing transformation.
It was an assumption devoid of logic. Does Dumitru believe that sophisticated, professional overseas clubs offer South Africa’s worst players lucrative contracts and leave the best of them to languish in the PSL?
Dumitru then precipitated his most embarrassing gaffe when recalling ex-Bafana central defender Pierre Issa from the international wilderness, proclaiming he was performing brilliantly in the Greek Premier League and had recently been chosen ”Player of the Month” in that country.
The truth was that Issa, whose performances for Bafana had often been plagued by inconsistency, had not played in Greece for six months while his club had been embroiled in a legal dispute over his contract.
The media assassins who hounded professional coaches like Philippe Troussier, Carlos Queiroz and Baxter out of South Africa should have had a field day with this indiscretion. Instead, they remained benignly silent or pointed out that Ted was a ”good guy”.
Good guy or not, the inconsistencies and flaws in the Bafana administration have reached epidemic proportions since Dumitru took over.
Kaizer Chiefs goalkeeper Emile Baron was not as much as informed when he was chosen for the Bafana squad — pre-empting a heated argument for his non-arrival at the Bafana camp and his decision to ”retire from international soccer”.
Dumitru unaccountably axed Nasief Morris from the squad in spite of the success he achieved for Panathinaikos in Greece, and openly indicated his disdain of Morris’s central defensive partner and Bafana captain, Aaron Mokoena.
It was the cynical campaign to deprive Mokoena of the captaincy and appoint Sibusiso Zuma, a form player, but one with no leadership exerience, that resulted in the Blackburn Rovers defender withdrawing from Afcon and proclaiming he could not see his way to representing South Africa while Dumitru was at the helm.
And in the midst of this myopic manouvering, Dumitru boasted that his new and relatively inexperienced squad that was deprived of players like Steven Pienaar and Delron Buckley was going to shock the continent in Egypt.
Neil Tovey, captain of Bafana Bafana when South Africa won their only Nations Cup title in 1996, described the performance against Guinea as ”the worst-ever at this level of competition”.
”It can’t get worse,” Tovey added before Bafana’s second game against cup holders Tunisia — and, in this respect, he was right.