Bafana must restore stature
It’s a mark of how weird the scheduling of the 2022 Fifa World Cup is, that on the very day the tournament kicks off in Qatar, there are also a bunch of international friendlies taking place across the globe.
The hosts will face Ecuador in Sunday’s opening Group A match at 6pm SA time, and about three hours and 45 minutes later Austria will take on Italy, but the latter match is purely amicable, one of 15 friendlies scheduled for Sunday, according to the website livescore.com.
For Italy in particular, World Cup finals regulars and four-time champions of the globe, this will no doubt be a decidedly weird occasion, one in which they would rather not be participting.
For South Africa, too, a friendly against Angola on Sunday at the Mbombela Stadium is not exactly a glamorous occasion, though their failure to qualify for the World Cup is par for the course.
On the back of years and years of dismal administration, a decline in quality in the national team has made it two decades now since Bafana Bafana qualified for a Fifa World Cup finals (they did play in 2010, of course, but as automatically qualified hosts).
The national mood in regard to Bafana veers perenially from anger to a kind of resigned acceptance of mediocrity. It is hard, right now, to have too much optimism around Bafana qualifying for a World Cup again, even though from 2026 the finals are being expanded to 48 teams, with nine, and possibly 10, places available to African teams (there are currently five spots).
For now, Bafana must surely focus on restoring some sort of stature on the continent, and that begins with qualifying for the next Africa Cup of Nations, currently scheduled for January 2024 in the Ivory Coast.
Bafana couldn’t even make it, after all to an Afcon finals earlier this year in Cameroon that had been expanded for the first time to 32 teams.
Victory in these up-coming friendlies, against Mozambique and Angola, can give Bafana a lift for the two Afcon qualifiers against Liberia in March, from which six points should guarantee them a place in the Afcon.
Bafana head coach Hugo Broos didn’t actually have a bad World Cup qualifying campaign, taking the side close to making it to the play-offs, only to be pipped at the post by Ghana, who ultimately defeated Nigeria to make it to Qatar.
But even the Belgian has acknowledged that he must qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations.
He has flip-flopped, has Broos, in first saying Bafana needed to play heavyweight opponents like France to improve, only to apparently decide he was happy to play weaker teams after seeing his side hammered 5-0 by the aforementioned France.
Bafana did beat Sierra Leone and Botswana in their most recent friendlies and to be fair this week, that tournament in Qatar made the choice of opposition rather limited.
After Sunday, Bafana will have to watch for a month from the couch, wondering what might have been.