For months the South African Football Association (Safa) has been talking about a ”turn-around strategy for Bafana Bafana” and a ”2010 vision”. Wednesday’s Nelson Mandela Inauguration match against Egypt in London is the last time the national team will get together this year and Safa’s two concepts are in danger of being exposed as semantic posturing.
There has been little progress in recent performances — a win against Zambia and a draw at home to Congo — but the national association says it remains optimistic about future plans and preparations for the team.
The two bodies specifically designed to handle the rebuilding process — the revamped technical committee and the new commercial wing — have been rendered impotent because of power-mongering and lack of foresight.
The head of the commercial wing, Mwelo Nonkonyana, cries ”sabotage” and accuses individuals within Safa of planning to derail the new company, while his counterpart at the technical committee, chairperson Sturu Pasiya, threatens to resign ”out of frustration” and the fact that the committee is facing ”serious challenges”.
Pasiya said this week he was not in a position to elaborate on certain issues because they were ”at [Safa] presidential level”.
One of the bones of contention between the technical committee and its mother body is control of the process of rebuilding Bafana Bafana.
Committee members are still peeved that they were not allowed to meet coach-designate Carlos Alberto Parreira when he made a brief visit to South Africa before the Congo game.
A committee member, who asked not to be identified, said: ”We never had discussions with him. We didn’t even get to greet him or wave to him from a distance.”
Safa also tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent Nonkonyana meeting Parreira. In his own words: ”I made my own arrangements to come to Johannesburg and meet him. I was never invited.”
What is apparent is that as long as the commercial wing is inoperative and the efforts of the technical committee to rebuild Bafana Bafana are hamstrung, the national team contines to drift along without meaningful direction.
The extent to which Safa is floundering is reflected by the recent failure of the under-20 national team to qualify for the African Youth Championships to be held in the Democratic Republic of Congo next year. They lost to Zambia. And this week Banyana Banyana was knocked out of the African Women’s Championships.
The technical committee member was blunt: ”We cannot move forward until the [commercial wing] takes over Bafana Bafana. We have to start having meetings with coaches soon to find out what are the major problems facing our teams and why are our youth teams not performing.”
That the three elements integral to progress — the technical committee, Parreira and the commercial wing — have failed to meet means that, contrary to what Safa officials have been saying, they have not drawn up a policy document specifically aimed at preparations and the programme for Bafana Bafana leading up to 2010.
Parreira, who is due to take up his position in February, made some recommendations after his brief visit on what needed to be done and what could be done before he took over the reins. It is not clear what action is being taken on those suggestions, and who is coordinating it.
Safa CEO Raymond Hack said: ”There will be a lekgotla where all these aspects are going to be discussed. After that it won’t be for anyone to put their interpretation on what needs to be done.”
Responding to a question about what exactly the plans for the team were, Hack was emphatic that nothing was yet finalised: ”Not at this stage. We thought when [Parreira] comes his strategy will be aligned with ours. The coach must buy into our vision and improve on areas he wants to. The coach will identify the players, we cannot tell him what to do. He will have his own input on issues when he starts next year.”
Some of the recommendations that were ratified by the Safa national executive committee early this year include the assessment of national coaches and what they are doing and the alignment of development programmes around the country.However, the technical committee has not received any documents and there is no headway being made on the development programmes.
One of the problems facing the committee is that the Premier Soccer League — the professional wing — now wants to start its own reserve league. This runs against the technical committee’s own recommendations that football start with rugby-style youth leagues around the country.
The committee argues that if the PSL is allowed to run the reserve league it will only be for the elite clubs rather than ”benefit all the children in the provinces, in the rural areas. It is actually sad that the concept has now being hijacked and interpreted for the benefit of a few.”
One of the points vigorously made by Parreira was that the national team needs to start playing against strong opposition in order for the many inexperienced players to get used to competing at a high level.
The committee has not drawn up a schedule for Bafana Bafana for next year. ”Actually we don’t have any idea what is going on. Maybe someone is trying to organise things behind our back as usual,” said the Mail & Guardian source.
He says the team might struggle to organise friendlies next year because most countries try and arrange dates at the beginning of the international calendars.
”We were supposed to have started exploring the dates and looking at openings a long time ago, but we are sitting and doing nothing. We have not had meetings in a long time.”