Football fans hoping that new national coach Carlos Alberto Parreira would deliver a ”new dawn” type of speech at his first media conference since he officially took over would have left the Sandton Convention Centre disappointed.
Parreira’s message to the media on Thursday was that he is a practical man. Exotic images of the Bafana Bafana side playing to the rhythms of Brazilian Samba may as well be aborted now.
”Our programme will be to build a competitive team. It is a long process. Everybody needs time,” he said.
To Parreira’s advantage is that things cannot get any worse for the national side than they are now.
After South Africa went through the last Africa Cup of Nations without winning a match or scoring a goal, even the most patriotic of fans had to accept that the game is in a parlous state.
It also means that the coach, who turns 64 on February 27, will have his work cut out for him to fulfil the expectations of an nation hoping for some respite after years of decline.
Even so, he was modest in his promises for the World Cup. ”The best will obviously be to win the cup. But the host nation must qualify for the second round.”
Though he said the three games he had seen the national team play were not enough to measure adequately the standard of the local game, Parreira’s diagnosis of the ills wouldn’t have come as a surprise.
”The quality is good, but I worry about the finishing locally and in the national team. That is what makes a difference.”
Then he bemoaned the lack of youth structures. Again. After his appointment, Parreira said he was disappointed to learn that there was no under-20 league.
Though the South African Football Association (Safa) runs the under-19 Metropolitan Cup, this didn’t appear to impress Parreira.
He did indicate, though, that his sides would be a mixture of youth and experience.
Having coached Brazil, Parreira will come to the job with a skin as thick as it needs to be. Just as the media conference was polite in the beginning, after a period of grace his tenure will become tougher and his critics will increase in the 1 221 days from the day this edition hit the stands. His appeal that ”everybody needs time” will not wash for too long.
At the sight of the first cracks, ”experts” will go on a ”we told you so” campaign, pointing out the flaws in his philosophy.
There will be those who will continue to question the hiring of the Brazilian, especially when results don’t go South Africa’s way. Some will argue that a local coach who understands the players would have been a better bet.
Others will point to the fact that Parreira has never played professionally — and, inherent in that argument, the belief that he lacks understanding of player psychology. The latter argument has repeatedly been found wanting.
Highly successful Italian coach Arrigo Sacchi, who, like Parreira, never played at the top level, put it best when he said: ”You don’t need to have been a horse to be a jockey.”
Parreira left his first media conference in no doubt that he was the man in charge.
Contrary to the belief that he was a humble man, he said: ”I have never had a problem imposing my ideas.”
He pointed to the fact that he had been part of three Brazil teams that won the World Cup (1970 as fitness trainer and 1994 and 2002 as coach) and coached three other national teams to the World Cup (Kuwait, 1982, United Arab Emirates 1990 and Saudi Arabia in 1998). ”I am not humble, I am a simple man. There is a difference. I have my feet on the ground.”
In Brazil he was criticised for employing ”boring and outdated methods” that led to the perennial favourites being knocked out in the quarterfinals of the last World Cup ,in Germany.
He gave no intimation that he would be changing his ways in South Africa. ”My ideas have been working for 38 years, I am not going to change now.”
For Parreira, the most important part of the job will be to make the team excel.
Parreira, who once told Brazilian media that history remembers winners and not good football, came across as less outcome-based than the quote attributed to him. Asked how we would like to be remembered after his tenure here, he responded: ”By the results and good entertaining football. People are always looking for the results, I think it is a wrong vision.”
Ever the practical man, he added: ”But we will be judged by the results, not the work.”