It is a big honour to be part of the set-up

Iowe it to the South African Football Association and coach Stuart Baxter for giving me the opportunity to join the Bafana Bafana Cosafa Cup squad in a player advisory role and learn about the functioning of a senior national team.

Part of my responsibility is to learn how the national team is being prepared and familiarise myself with the happenings in the squad because that will help me grow, especially as I am also working with coach Thabo Senong in the junior national team.

This, for me, speaks to the relationships between the senior team and the junior teams and that is the opportunity I am embracing. What is important is for me is to use the experience I have from my playing days in the national team and the knowledge I have gained as a coach.

It not only gives me an opportunity, but challenges me on how I will assist players in terms of talking to them on a personal basis on how to be professional and how they have to go about it on and off the pitch. My role is centred on emphasising professionalism. They also learn that at their clubs, but at national team level there are also elements footballers need to grasp and understand.

It is more about sharing ideas on how they should live as professionals and how they can improve their performances. More often than not, you find out the majority of the players in the squad are big-name players. That is the case with this crop of players, but at the same time they need to be reminded of their roles and what is expected from them on the field, as well as their role outside of football.

Once you have that balance, you are in a better position to perform to best of your ability. What I usually do is talk to the players about my challenges and failures and the successes I have experienced as a player. I always focus on encouraging them and they must stay focused because in football things can go badly wrong, although we always hope for the contrary. When things go wrong, we focus on how to deal with it and make sure we build a better player and a much better person.

Some of the things I share with the players are not necessarily what happened to me but it was what I have witnessed from players who were around me.

As a young player, you need to know there are possibilities that – regardless of how good you may be – your career might not take off because of challenges we may fail to address or overcome.

We need to make players aware that those challenges will always

be part of our lives. What is key is to channel the players towards the best possible ways of dealing with these challenges.

Above all, we work together as a team which consists of the head coach, the assistant coaches, myself, the technical director and other key members. We are all here to collaborate and make sure we fulfil the mandate of the association.

All of us bring our individual expertise into the squad. The head coach has one pair of eyes, and with football being so complex, you need more pairs of eyes to spot and identify some things the coach might miss.

Most importantly, those individuals need to be the right personnel and be people who are knowledgeable.