Broos is right, but Bafana’s demise is nothing new | The Citizen

There was plenty of backlash this week after Bafana Bafana head coach Hugo Broos launched a scathing attack on the quality of South African football. ALSO READ: Was Broos not supposed to come with solutions to Bafana’s problems? Mamelodi Sundowns senior coach Steve Komphela accused Broos of lacking respect, while Cape Town City striker Kermit Erasmus shouted: “Why do we have a coach who doesn’t believe in our talent and league? Sorry for thinking out loud.” I’ve tried to sit back and reflect on both sides of this well-worn argument. Komphela and Erasmus have gone down the line of ‘the…

There was plenty of backlash this week after Bafana Bafana head coach Hugo Broos launched a scathing attack on the quality of South African football.

ALSO READ: Was Broos not supposed to come with solutions to Bafana’s problems?

Mamelodi Sundowns senior coach Steve Komphela accused Broos of lacking respect, while Cape Town City striker Kermit Erasmus shouted: “Why do we have a coach who doesn’t believe in our talent and league? Sorry for thinking out loud.”

I’ve tried to sit back and reflect on both sides of this well-worn argument. Komphela and Erasmus have gone down the line of ‘the coach and player doth protest too much, methinks’, their reactions a little over-defensive.

To be fair, they didn’t go the Shakes Mashaba route, and start trying to claim the Premier Soccer League is as good as the English Premier League. Komphela, indeed, seemed to have more of a problem with Broos’ tone than what the Belgian said.

Broos does, at time, confront issues with all the finesse of a sledgehammer, though this can also be refreshing in a world at times riddled with political correctness.

Furthermore, is Broos not just spitting truths when he says that South African football lacks the quality to compete with the best in Africa? This country has fallen way down the pecking order in the continental game, let alone the global game.

Broos is 100 percent right to describe playing in the 2010 Fifa World Cup finals as a “present” given that South Africa qualified only as hosts. It’s 20 years now since Bafana played in a World Cup they went through qualifying to get to.

Qualification for the Africa Cup of Nations is also no longer a given and Bafana hit a new nadir under Molefi Ntseki when they failed to make it to an expanded 32-team Afcon in Cameroon earlier this year.

There is not one South African playing regularly in the English Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A or France’s Ligue 1, widely regarded as the top five leagues in the world. So how can we realistically compete with the likes of Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and plenty more?

On the other side of the coin, it is not exactly as if this situation has changed since Broos took the Bafana job. The 70 year-old must have known what he was getting himself into when he was appointed in May 2021 and in this sense, calling a press conference to complain about the quality of the local game does seem more than a little pointless.

Broos seems to be playing politics a bit too much in this regard – if he succeeds in any way he can be hailed as a genius, and if he fails he can just blame the system he is working in.

In this sense, he might well have been better off not calling this press conference at all and just focusing on the task at hand – beating Liberia twice in September to qualify for the 2023 Afcon. This, at least, should be well within Bafana’s capabilities.