‘Bafana are symptom of [SA’s] problems’

What do you do with an eight-month long break from competitive international football?

That’s the scenario facing Bafana Bafana after their failure to qualify for the 2018 Fifa World Cup whose 32 finalists were part of the final draw in Moscow, Russia, on Friday.

Bafana were set to resume their Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) qualifying campaign with a Group E home match against Libya in March but the Confederation of African Football (Caf) announced early this week that those qualifiers will now resume in September.

Caf relented after a request from the five World Cup-bound African finalists who wanted Afcon qualifiers postponed so that they have ample time to prepare for the world showpiece.

Caf’s decision left teams like Bafana in limbo, as they will now be kicking their heels until September 7 when the Afcon qualifiers resume.

Farouk Khan, a football analyst and former assistant coach at Kaizer Chiefs, said if South Africa had proper development this would have been an ideal time to blood youngsters in Bafana.

“You can’t right now tell our national team coach [Stuart Baxter] to start using 19-year-olds,” said Khan. “That will be suicide.

“It’s not Baxter’s fault that there isn’t enough younger players. It’s a fault of the country for not having the right youthdevelopment structures producing players good enough to play for Bafana at that age like you see in Brazil and England.”

Ideally, according to Khan, any Bafana coach should get players ready to play and then the coach’s mandate should be to win matches. “How he does it [winning], is entirely up to him.”

Khan said the country hasn’t conducted serious evaluation of Bafana’s failure.

“Bafana are a symptom of our problems. What we need to look at are the causes. There’s no in-depth analysis on what we should do to fix things right at the bottom, where our problems start,” he said.

“It’s only through proper development that we can ensure that the coach gets players who are ready for any competition. The question is, the players that we want to blood, are they ready? The answer is they are not.”

Khan will tomorrow, with other members of the South African Football Association’s (Safa) technical committee, meet Baxter to review the team’s failure to qualify for Russia.

Last week, Safa chief executive Dennis Mumble told the Sunday Times that Baxter’s future epended on what the technical committee recommends.