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Congratulations are in order for Amajita – the Under-20 South African national football team – for qualifying to be one of the 24 teams participating in the Under-20 World Cup.
This time, they went a bit further by receiving bronze medals for finishing third at the continental tournament by beating South Africa’s perennial football nemesis, Nigeria, in the third-place play-off.
Amajita came fourth the last time around.
Safa must also be given a pat on the back for having a second national team qualifying for a global event within three months following Banyana Banyana’s heroics in December.
Many would say hailing Safa for this is tantamount to praising a fish for swimming.
However, I am a great believer in giving praise where it is deserved, but I also criticise harshly when things go awry because of wrongdoing or failure to do what’s expected.
For many years, I have berated Safa for setting the bar for national coaches so low that one of the conditions was qualification for continental competitions.
My contention has always been that, for a country that has so many players imbued with natural football talent as well as world-class facilities, qualification for African finals should not even be negotiable.
In fact, the target should be to win at continental level and do well at global events by at least reaching the knock-out stages.
So far, with the exception of the Under-20s at the 2009 World Cup, the Under-17s, Banyana Banyana, Bantwana (our women’s national Under-17 team) and the Under-23s have not managed to go past the first round of their respective global finals.
Even Bafana Bafana suffered the same fate at the 1998 – South Africa’s first – and the 2002 World Cup finals.
Now that Banyana and the Under-20s have become the latest to qualify for their respective world cups, the aim should be to do better.
How can this be achieved?
By having better preparations than South African teams have had in the past. Do things differently this time around.
One of the masterstrokes of the Solomon “Stix” Morewa era was the establishment of an annual Four Nations tournament for Bafana Bafana, which involved three other countries from the continent.
Many – including yours truly – still regard this as one of the major factors that led to Clive Barker’s Babes winning the 1996 Afcon tournament.
The tournament was played in a similar round robin fashion as the first round of all global football tournaments, and this got Bafana used to playing several matches in the space of a few days.
Safa would do well to call on the European nations that they have memorandums of understanding with – such as Spain – to work at establishing such tournaments for all the national teams.
They could even tap into our country’s Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) connections and establish annual tournaments involving these countries.
Can you imagine a Four Nations tournament hosted by South Africa with Brazil, Russia and China as the other participating nations?
This would bear very good fruit as it would give our national teams a chance to pit their wits against European, South American and Asian opposition.
These would be the kinds of opponents they would have to compete with at global level.
Given how well junior and women’s national teams have done in the past few years, Bafana Bafana should not be in the position where they need a win or a draw at all costs in their last Afcon qualifier against Libya over the weekend of March 22 to 24.
The senior men’s national football team has found itself in such a pickle so many times that one has lost count.
That should not be the case, particularly as they failed to beat the Seychelles, of all the countries to be in this dire state.
Bafana should be qualifying for the Afcon on a canter, consistently proceeding to be one of the five African nations at the World Cup and going past the first round every time.
However, this is not the case.
Should the status quo persist and Bafana fail to qualify for Afcon, that will undo all the good work Safa has done with junior and women’s national teams, and it will forever hover over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.
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