NEW COACH MORE DOOMSDAY PROPHET THAN PIONEER

HUGO Broos is a train wreck waiting to happen. Forget any five-year plans, he is unlikely to be around in 18 months.

Whatever the situation, the clever people at the South African Football Association should have fought harder to find a resolution to local favourite Benni McCarthy’s demands to be the Bafana Bafana coach.

McCarthy, initially a breath of fresh air at Cape Town City, left suddenly and without much warning. He found a second home at Amazulu and a near perfect fit. The two, as club and individual, are thriving.

The players at Amazulu are loving McCarthy and he is getting results he shouldn’t be getting given the limitations in his squad and the abundance of talent elsewhere in the PSL.

But, and there is always a but in South African soccer, foreign is always deemed to be better.

Another foreigner was introduced to the South African soccer public in Broos and his first utterance was to tell the South African soccer fraternity to write off any prospect of qualification for the next World Cup. Great stuff. Not.

Cool gig if you can get it, when you start talking about five-year World Cup plans and place a greater premium on qualifying for the Africa Cup of Nations than the World Cup.

There are those defending Broos as being a realist, but if that’s so, then what is the point of even playing in the World Cup qualifiers?

Broos has thrown in the towel on a campaign that was supposed to be South Africa’s redemption from the disaster of the most recent failed Africa Cup of Nations qualification.

Alternatively, Broos is ensuring he isn’t fired because of a failure to make it through the World Cup qualifiers, and privately he believes he can stun all South Africa and qualify.

He would then be hailed a Messiah.

It is wishful thinking to want to believe him to walk on water and I don’t see the point of paying a foreigner to advance mediocrity.

If the 2022 World Cup is a writeoff, then why not the investment in a South African coach, who is given the time to build a team with the knowledge that there’s no expectation to win in the next 12 months?

I don’t want a realist in charge of Bafana Bafana. I want someone who believes he is a miracle worker. I want a boss who is a dreamer and who has ambition and aspiration.

Of all the Bafana Bafana national coach introductions over the past two decades, Broos’s left me feeling the most despondent. He was more a doomsday prophet than a pioneer. Broos spoke of realism and losing. He even spoke of death, saying that if Bafana Bafana failed to reach the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations in the Ivory Coast “you can kill” him.

Crazy talk in a country like ours, because you won’t struggle to find someone who would take him up on that invitation.

Broos won’t be around in 18 months to be killed off, and I don’t mean literally taken out. I mean to be axed as coach. He would have left within a year.

He has been appointed because of past glories, having won the 2017 Cup of Nations title in Gabon with Cameroon.

Broos, post 2017, was a disaster with Cameroon. They lost 4-0 to Nigeria and won just one of six World Cup qualifiers and finished last in a Confederation Cup group, taking one point from a possible nine in three matches.

Cameroon couldn’t wait to send him packing and South Africa’s soccer bosses, schooled in sustained mediocrity, couldn’t wait to sign him.

You don’t need hindsight to know how the movie is going to end.