We cannot give up and accept 1996 was Bafana at their peak
Saturday February 3 marked 22 years since Bafana Bafana won the Africa Cup of Nations and the silence was deafening. Apart from a few people who took to social media to reminisce about SA football’s most famous afternoon, the day went by almost unnoticed.
The response to Bafana’s 1996 triumph has certainly become increasingly muted each year and that image of captain Neil Tovey hoisting the trophy, with jubilant former president Nelson Mandela, King Goodwill Zwelithini, FW de Klerk and coach Clive Barker looking on, is starting to fade into distant memory.
In the immediate years after that glorious afternoon, the achievement was mythologised in SA as the high point of our footballing achievement. and the two goals Mark Williams scored after replacing Phil Masinga with 25 minutes to go were a staple diet on our television screens in the days leading up to February 3.
Coaches, analysts and talent scouts used the game to motivate aspiring players who also dreamt of making it big overseas just like Williams. But as one despondent fan pointed out, 1996 has become our 1966 (a reference to England’s lone football World Cup title and their inability to scale the same dizzy heights since). It seems that victory has become an albatross around the neck.
It is this acceptance of mediocrity that bothers me and if you look around, it seems even the players too are starting to believe it.
Qualifying for the World Cup and for the African Nations Cup and ensuring that we remain in a respectable position on the continental and global rankings are things we no longer take for granted.
Hell, Bafana have not qualified for the World Cup since Mozambique-born Carlos Queiroz got SA to the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan. Briton Stuart Baxter failed to get SA to the 2006 event in Germany and the only reason Bafana participated in the tournament four years later was because Fifa used our taxpayers’ money to host the 2010 travelling circus.
As if to hammer home this sobering point, coach Gordon Igesund failed to qualify for the 2014 competition in Brazil and Baxter continued the trend in his second spell as mentor when he couldn’t get Bafana to the 2018 party in Russia.
Things are not any better on the continent and anyone who tells you they have complete confidence in Bafana when they play in the Nations Cup qualifiers should be publicly flogged for lying. Bafana are largely erratic and you have a better chance of predicting the winning lottery numbers than knowing with absolute certainty how our national team will perform on any given day.
Their positioning on the Fifa and Caf rankings is a story we will leave for another day. One thing is certain though, the idea that we can crack the world’s top 20 and reach the 19th place we achieved after winning the 1996 Afcon is starting to look like a pipe dream.
Small wonder then that it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince people born after the turn of the millennium that there was a time when teams actually shook in their boots ahead of matches against Bafana Bafana.
But as bleak as all of this may sound, we simply cannot afford to throw in the towel and just accept things as they are.
Winning the 1996 Afcon should not be viewed as an impossible burden to overcome and perhaps Bafana should rather use that achievement to give themselves a huge kick on the backside.
The fact is we do have the talent in this country and the folks at Safa House and at the Premier Soccer League need to return to the lab and search for that misplaced winning formula that allowed SA to ascend to the top of the continental food chain 22 years ago.