Safa suits ignore expert advice for voodoo magic
“THE level of our players nowadays is technically worse. Our ball control is worse, as is our passing, and people sometimes confuse juggling with the ability to play football, but they are different things.”
Who said these words? When and why? Which country is he talking about?
While you crack your skull to figure out who the person is, let me add this bit. “We know exactly what our problems are, but we don’t know how to fix them or we lack capable people with knowledge to understand the best path to take.”
Got it yet? Let me put you out of your misery, my friend.
“This is what Brazilian football lacks. [If we fixed the problems] we could certainly keep managers longer and improve the development of players, which is something that has declined a lot.”
His name is Mano Menezes, the man Brazil fired in 2012.
They got Luis Fellipe Scolari to knock them into shape.
But Big Phil watched as they were knocked out of shape right in their backyard in a manner never witnessed before. Even Christ the Redeemer went blind from watching the brutal blekseming of Brazil.
Menezes could have been opining about South Africa in his accurate observation of the ramshackle that is Brazil.
Brazil and South Africa have never been on par football-wise. They have five world titles. We have zero. They have eight Copa America (South American Championship) titles. We have one African Nations Cup crown.
Believing that we play a similar style, we brought in Carlos Alberto Parreira. The project bombed spectacularly when we earned the dubious distinction of being the first World Cup host to be guillotined in the group stages.
There are common traits in Brazil and Bafana Bafana’s decline. Between 1994 and 1996, both countries rode the crest of the wave, Brazil as world champions and Bafana as African conquerors.
Over the years, Brazil have rested on their laurels.
We too basked in our past glory. In their dodo-like imagination, the geniuses at the South African Football Association scuppered, sabotaged and euthanised the great promise we showed on our return from international isolation.
We became nomadic in coaching, going Portuguese, English and Brazilian in pursuit of a playing identity.
Former coaches Carlos Queiroz, Stuart Baxter and Parreira have presented detailed reports to put in place solid structures to breath life into our football.
No one at Safa dared to implement it. Safa did nothing, noto, zero, zilch. I’m lying. They did something. They secretly got an inyanga to give them muti to win the World Cup. They forgot to pay him the balance of his money and he cast a spell on Bafana. Whether you believe this or dismiss it as mumbo-jumbo is immaterial.
What matters is that all that Safa has done in overseeing the decline of our national teams was go to seek the expertise of an inyanga. Voodoo kings we have running our football.
I bet now that Germany has won the World Cup, we will want to go the German way.
They once got us a guy called Horst Kriete as technical director. He was German and he gave us nothing. They then got a clown called Marcos Fallopa, a bumbling Brazilian clown whose buffoonery was surpassed by Joel Santana’s.
The Safa administration has been a passion killer for our soccer. Danny Jordaan is promising change. He excuses himself from the Safa rot by hiding behind being busy with preparations for the 2010 World Cup. Bafana’s new coach hasn’t been appointed yet because Jordaan was busy with the 2014 World Cup. The time for him to be busy with Safa and show us he understands the path to take is long overdue.