When Bafana Bafana players touched down at the OR Tambo International Airport in the early hours of Wednesday morning, they were met by a boisterous and ecstatic crowd who had swathed the arrivals section in a sea of SA flags.
It did not matter that the team was landing at 4:00am – the fans, resplendent in the colours of Bafana, descended in large numbers to chant for their favourite players and heroes.
Even coach Hugo Broos admitted that he did not expect such a raucous reception – he had been on a cat-and-mouse fight with the fickle SA supporters after his previous remarks when he arrived in Mzansi. Broos bemoaned the low standards of the PSL and how the players were unknown in big European leagues.
The love for Bafana is coming back in a flurry, coinciding well with Valentine’s Day this week. South Africans love winners; that’s why the adulation for the World Cup Springboks was so overwhelming, sweeping the entire country like a whirlwind.
Bafana are on a meteoric rise again, and the latest Fifa rankings can bear testimony to this. After the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, where they reached the semifinals and won a bronze medal, they are now number 58 in the world and number 10 in Africa. The South Africans had been wallowing nowhere near respectable numbers in the last two decades or so. But things, it seems, are getting back to
respectable ways.
But sadly, the same cannot be said about the office-bearers, Safa and PSL bickering. The conflict is now glaring, and even Stevie Wonder can see that. On Sunday, the league released a statement announcing that the league’s midweek fixtures are postponed due to the national team only arriving back in the country on Wednesday.
The league would have known as early as the quarterfinal fixture against Cape Verde that Bafana would be staying in Ivory Coast for the third-fourth place play-offs that were pencilled in for Saturday, February 10. So why continue scheduling matches for Tuesday, February 13? Why not postpone after the quarterfinals, instead of waiting for two days before the league matches were scheduled to
resume?
What is happening here is that the league and Safa did not have the belief that Bafana would advance as far as they did in the tournament. The league underestimated the capabilities of its own players and was of the opinion they would falter and come back in the early stages of the competition, as has been the case in previous tournaments. That lulled it into a false sense of confidence that its already-scheduled fixtures were not going to be affected.
If the two biggest football organisations were running the same race and held their players in high regard, the embarrassing situation could have been avoided.
At the moment, PSL has the bargaining power because it has the players and a massive cash influx due to the billions it gets from broadcast deals, and it does not give a hoot about what is happening at Safa.
On the other hand, SAFA is hell bent on showing the league who the real bosses of SA diski are, but it does not have the charisma and the muscle to put the league in its place.
This has to stop, because it has the potential to derail Bafana from its quest of regaining their mojo and reinstating themselves as a powerhouse on the continent. The sooner the two parties sort out their grievances, for the benefit of SA football and not for personal egos, the better.
