Benni has a bright future

AFTER a week of being led to believe that Benni McCarthy would coach Bafana Bafana, we can safely say that we were duped, hoodwinked, sucker-punched, led down the garden path, misdirected and hilariously misled.

Wow, either Safa just played the best game of Who is it? ever, or the Benni deal fell through completely, and the association still managed to bamboozle us all. Instead, yesterday morning the rumour that Hugo Broos was to be the new man in charge of the men’s senior national team started to circulate – and proved to be true later at the official announcement.

Now, I don’t think his appointment on a five-year contract is a bad move. Broos has won with an African team, Cameroon, at the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations, so he knows how to lead a team to victory. As always, it will be whether a bunch of often allegedly spoilt players, especially those abroad, are willing to follow his instructions.

It would have been cool to have Benni as the coach, don’t get me wrong. A South African legend in his own right, he could possibly have commanded the respect of his players.

And yet, now that Broos has been appointed, and the hype of a McCarthy-led tenure consigned to the excitement of the past week, perhaps having a coach with that much more experience will be the more constructive decision.

McCarthy surely has a bright future as a manager and coach. Not becoming the Bafana coach now, while disappointing for many, is not the worst thing to happen to him right now.

Let him rather continue to grow within a system where such growth is possible, and where the pressure of failure is still manageable.