The South African Football Association (Safa) will beef up its coaching department by appointing the highly-acclaimed Morena Ramoreboli and former Bafana Bafana defender David Nyathi to their junior national teams.
Ramoreboli is coaching in Botswana, in charge of Jwaneng Galaxy in the country’s to pflight. He orchestrated Orlando Pirates’ early exit in the CAF Champions League preliminary rounds. Safa appointed Ramoreboli to guide Bafana in the Cosafa Cup in recent years. He was in charge of the team in 2021 and in last year’s tournament.
There has been an outcry as to why the SA junior national teams do not have full-time coaches and also why they are not playing enough friendly matches, something that has contributed to the teams failing to qualify for continental competitions and the Fifa junior World Cups.
The SA Under-23 does not have a coach since the departure of David Notoane, who resigned from his post on a national radio station after the team bombed out in the qualifiers of this year’s Olympic Games.
Said Safa vice-president Linda Zwane: “The NEC dealt with the issues of various coaches of various national teams. Coach Morena Ramoreboli has been identified for the SA Under-23 team. For the SA Under-20, Raymond Mdaka has been earmarked. David Nyathi will take over the SA Under-17 squad.”
“This is part of the package that says we are more focused on football than on other things. If you look at the technical department going forward, you will see that Safa is a football organisation, it’s not like government, as Fifa always says. These are the decisions we have taken in line with the organogram that was presented in the NEC meeting.”
“We are looking to have these coaches full-time instead of part-time as it has been the case. We also want to make the Olympics teams active, thus we have identified Ramoreboli for the job. With the other two teams, we are pushing to have these coaches soon, so that we can have activities for them,” he said.
“We do not want these teams to be visible only when there are qualifying matches, they must go and play friendly games. Like the SA Under-17 that recently played in Morocco. It is part of the process.
“We also want to prepare our teams well in advance so that we don’t have these complaints, because that works against us,” Zwane explained further.
