Attitude has to be right for Bafana to progress

Iwould like to start off by conveying my heartfelt condolences to the late Dr Petrus Molemela’s family after the entire football fraternity lost a giant of our game.

Meanwhile, Bafana Bafana put up a good performance on Saturday in their 3-1 win over Guinea Bissau. Let’s start with the attitude of the players – a player’s attitude for me is a disease that has to be addressed every time.

If we continue to address it, this kind of performance will not be a once-off performance. In other words, we need consistency. If we can continue with the same attitude, I have no doubt we can achieve the same results.

One thing I hope is that the attitude of the players is not based on the fact that some of them did not have a good working relationship with the previous coach Shakes Mashaba. Mostly, players will use that as motivation once they are given the opportunity to play, like it happened that we had players on Saturday who did not see eye-to-eye with the former coach. They were motivated to go out there and prove a point. I am not too sure that proving a point is the right way to go at this level of football.

The technical team has been there for a while, so they know the demands and the requirements of the national team. As much as we have players who are performing quite well in our domestic league and are playing week-in week-out you do also need to add overseas-based experience. When you bring in those overseas-based players as starters, you do that so you can gradually integrate local players who are doing very well – players like Percy Tau and Thabo Mnyamane.

We don’t need to throw them in the deep end just because they are playing well. I will make an example with myself. When I was playing very well for Orlando Pirates – and that was not only me, there were a number of us – when I got to the national team, I started on the bench and I was integrated in a more progressive way. That was to stop me from breaking. The technical team is protecting these players by introducing them gradually.

Imagine putting these players in a situation where the team is trailing, some of them can have their game disturbed and some may never recover from that.

Today against Angola, I would like to see a much more focused performance from our boys, more commitment and they need to take most of the chances they create. They need to improve from the game against Guinea-Bissau.

Moving to Saturday and the match between Kaizer Chiefs and Mamelodi Sundowns, there will be fireworks, Chiefs will be playing under more pressure, considering the number of games they have played and the points they have accumulated. If Sundowns win, it will psychologically kill Chiefs. So it will be very important for Chiefs to win that game, even though it will be very tough for them.

Moving on to continental football, we should be proud that the PSL is not only about the big sponsorships it is enjoying, it is giving us something we should be proud of as we see our teams representing us in continental tournaments.

We need to make sure we sustain it and make sure that in each and every continental club competition we have more representatives. We need to move away from only having one team qualifying for the latter stages. We need to sustain these spots.