One reason FIFA is concerned about whether South Africa will be ready to host the World Cup in 2010 is the state of its transport infrastructure, and the fact that work has not yet begun on any of the stadiums that must be built or refurbished. Another is the crime rate. Not being at home, I’m not in a position to comment on either. My friend, the risk analyst Nic Borain, offers the following:
Can the country protect players and spectators from crime?
Can the country build and renovate the required ’stadia’ (the silly plural of stadium) to adequate standards and on time?
Can the country solve its urban infrastructure problems, particularly as these relate to accommodation and, more importantly, to transport - the getting of players and spectators safely and efficiently into the country and from hotels to games and from city to city?
Does the country have the capacity to bring communications facilities up to the exacting standards required by Fifa?
Are we going to run out of skills - project managers, engineers, planners, every kind of artisan imaginable?
Does South Africa have the capacity to enforce the intellectual and advertising exclusivities required by Fifa?
On these, I have nothing to offer, although Nic says “South Africa will cope with all the major technological and infrastructural issues relating to the World Cup in 2010 and we suspect that national pride and prejudice will cause South Africans from every walk of life to be on their very best behaviour during these finals.
For Nic’s final question –
Can South Africa field a soccer team that will not be humiliated on home turf?
– I can venture some answers, though.
FIFA is justifiably concerned about the state of the game in South Africa. For a World Cup tournament to be a success, the reasoning goes, the home team must get at least to the quarter finals. That way, home crowd interest is maintained and the tournament has some atmosphere and excitement. Let’s just say that on that front, the outlook is pretty grim. When SAFA decides to play a friendly against Egypt in London because, its officials say, the match will draw a bigger crowd in the British capital than it would at home, wags may be tempted to point out the implications for the World Cup of SAFA chief Raymond Hack’s statement that for drawing a crowd “We’ll do better in London.”
It’s not hard to see why the national team doesn’t draw a crowd at home, either — right now, Bafana Bafana are pretty crap, their 1-0 away in Zambia the other week notwithstanding. On present indications, the chances of South Africa getting out of the group stage, let alone to the quarter finals, are pretty abysmal. In fact, it’s a safe bet that if the host nation was forced to qualify, we’d be unlikely to even play in the tournament on home soil. The recent home African nations cup qualifier against the Democratic Repulic of Congo, a 0-0 draw in front of 8,000 people, seemed to underscore just why FIFA should be worried. Right now, I’d rank South Africa no higher than 9th among African teams, behind (in no particular order) Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, Egypt, Tunisia and Mali.
FIFA seemed to recognize the problem when it gave South Africa $10 million to spend on hiring a coach capable of getting results. When reports surfaced that they were considering Sven Goran Eriksson, I had to laugh. It was as if the people responsible for making the selection were simply reading a few newspapers to find out who was “hot,” and then still getting it wrong. They finally settled on Carlos Alberto Parreira, the hapless fellow who managed to take a squad including Ronaldinho, Robinho, Kaka, Cicinho, Gilberto Silva, Ze Roberto, Fred and Luisao to the World Cup and return home empty handed. (That was because he insisted on playing the hopelessly overweight and unfit Ronaldo, as well as the jaded old timers Roberto Carlos and Cafu, and insisting on a formation that entirely stifled Ronaldinho’s talents by shackling him to a conventional left midfield role.) Very encouraging. In fact, if his last World Cup selections were anything to go by, I’d say Jomo Sono may still be asked to put on his shooting boots.
South Africa has plenty of talented players. Think about it: On any given weekend, you see Benni McCarthy shine for Blackburn or Quinton Fortune hold the line for Bolton; Steven Pienaar running the Dortmund midfield or Delron Buckley — at least until his form deserted him after leaving Amenia Bielefeld — making a name for himself as one of the Bundesliga’s most prolific scorers.
So what’s the problem?
Arrogance, for one thing. After he quit the job of national manager, Brit Stuart Baxter warned others against taking it. It was, he said, a poisoned chalice, with all sorts of interference in the coach’s prerogatives. He also noted that if you asked any South African fan or official how a top SA team such as Kaizer Chiefs would fare in a match against, say, Juventus, they’d tell you that the South Africans would win 3-0. (Perhaps they’re lulled by the fact that they occasionally play top British teams who’re taking a summer holiday stroll and don’t mind much being beaten by Orlando Pirates, because there’s nothing at stake and they’re just having a laugh.) In other words, South Africans imagine themselves as world beaters. That’s a bad attitude for a country with years of hard work to get through before it can compete on even terms with the likes of Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire.
Lack of professionalism in the national setup is clearly another: Players who’re earning their wages in European leagues haven’t seen it as any great honor to come home and play under an inferior coach in poor conditions; they need to be coaxed and treated respectfully. That’s just a reality — if they’re not handled with kid gloves, they can simply retire from international football and concentrate on their careers in Europe, whose club leagues remain the game’s premier global stage. That South Africa has treated its European-based players shoddily would be an understatement. (Baxter seemed to understand this; his immediate successor, Ted Dumitru, perhaps sensing that his achievements in SA domestic football would buy him little by way of respect from the European-based players, chose to omit many of them, perhaps to preserve his authority in the dressing room — the results at last year’s nations cup were predictably disastrous.)
But an even more fundamental problem concerns development. a**ume that the first-choice national team right now looks something like this:
Goal: Rowan Fernandez or Emile Barron or Moeneeb Josephs
Defense: Bradley Carnell, Aaron Mokoena, Nasief Morris, Cyril Nzama
Midfield: Stephen Pienaar, Quinton Fortune, Macbeth Sibaya, Delron Buckley or Benedict Vilakazi
Strikers: Benni McCarthy, Sibusiso Zuma or Glen Salmon
To be politically incorrect for a moment, the striking feature of this team is that it includes only four, perhaps five African players. One, maybe two whiteys; those cla**ified “Coloured” under apartheid make up the bulk of the team. For a different measure, try this list of the 39 South Africans playing in European leagues — only 14 are African. For those who don’t know, it’s worth pointing out that there are fewer “Coloured” people in South Africa than whiteys — no more than 3-4 million out of a population of 45 million. And yet they provide the bulk of the national football team, and make up a radically disproportionate share of the players “exported” to the elite leagues of Europe.
So what does that tell us? That “Coloured” people are somehow inherently better at football than Africans? Not at all. What it tells us is that the “Coloured” population, an inner-city community for more than a century, has in that time organically evolved an elaborate football infrastructure at community-level, where clubs integrate youngsters from an early age and nurture them as players. It wasn’t a government policy, just a community response that created this tradition, but it has created a very effective “factory” of very talented players raised with the skills, speed and guile of the streets but meshed with the discipline, tactical awareness, organization and experience that comes with playing in a very organized soccer system, which combine to give them a head-start in competing at any level. The urban political geography of South Africa made soccer evolve along very different lines in African communities. Sure, there were always professional and semi-professional leagues to snap up a talented youngster in his late teens and make him nationally known as a Teenage Dladla or a Marks Maponyane, but clearly the ma** youth football infrastructure that would transform the raw talent in African communities into top-level competitors isn’t nearly as highly developed.
They could get the genius Guus Hiddink to coach the national team and it wouldn’t alter the fact that the player pool from which he’d have to select is hobbled by SAFA’s obvious failure to cultivate young talent.
Being a defensive-minded fellow, Parreira — his greatest triumph being the dullest World Cup ever, won by the ultra defensive Brazil of 1994 — could credibly pull together a setup that avoids us getting trounced. Even Trinidad managed to keep a couple of clean sheets in Germany simply by virtue of sound defensive organization. But let’s just say that until SAFA gets its act together, the leading lights of African football — never mind the world’s best — will be leaving Bafana Bafana for dead.
The consolation, of course, is that the home crowd will get behind any African team that carries the torch even after Bafana’s exit — even Brazil! Let’s just say that I expect names like Didier Zokora, Salomon Kalou and Emmanuel Eboue to be know in every household in Soweto in 2010
