Mninawa Ntloko
20 August 2008
opinion
Johannesburg — IF YOU'RE thinking about going into hiding when the curtain comes down on the Beijing Olympic Games on Sunday, save yourself the trouble and rather wait because more humiliation is on the horizon.
Sure, the medals have been coming with the regularity of rants from Julius Malema that actually make sense.
But at least Team SA is humiliating us far away in distant Beijing. Hell, they are on another bloody continent!
Our beloved national soccer team, on the other hand, could very well do the business right here at home. Let's face it, the odds on Bafana Bafana bombing out in the opening round of the 2010 Soccer World Cup without winning a match or even scoring a goal have shortened considerably since one Joel Natalino Santana became coach.
If you think I'm being a tad too harsh, then consider this: Bafana are probably in worse shape now than they were before erstwhile coach Carlos Alberto Parreira took over at the beginning of last year.
This team is so hopeless that it seems the only way we can score a goal is if we stick one past our own goalkeeper.
Things are so bad that no soccer fan is going to tell you with a straight face that he/she has complete confidence in the current bunch. And our man Santana is part of the problem.
The poor guy looks completely out of his depth and with good reason too. Remember, this Bafana gig was his first ever at this level after coaching soccer clubs almost all his life.
So effectively, the man is actually doing in-service training while on the job. S uch is the craziness of it all that we do not see anything wrong with that!
Santana was a greenhorn at this level but Parreira wielded so much power at the South African Football Association (Safa) that the job practically landed in his lap when his good friend decided to quit and return to his wife in Brazil a few months ago.
It seems Santana could have even recommended his bloody gardener to Safa and no one in that dysfunctional place would have questioned anything.
And now the nation is paying the price for another poor decision by those bungling suits in Nasrec who've unfortunately been entrusted with running the sport.
The national shame could get into the swing of things as early as September 6 when Bafana face Nigeria in a 2010 African Nations Cup qualifier in Port Elizabeth.
Failure to beat the powerhouse west Africans will ensure that we do not line up against the continent's best teams in Angola in 2010.
The tournament will, of course, be held just four months before the World Cup in SA and you can imagine the embarrassment if we fail to qualify for the continental competition that precedes the global showpiece.
So the importance of next month's showdown against Nigeria cannot be heightened enough and we cannot even contemplate the possibility of failure in Port Elizabeth.
But as you can imagine we are already expecting the worst because Santana was on holiday in Brazil when he should have been monitoring his team.
He is still very much clueless about his players and indications are that he didn't even select the squad that played against Australia in an international friendly last night.
Oh, and did I mention that after communicating with the media in English before the start of the disastrous campaign in June, his fluency in the language has suddenly become such a problem that he insists on a Portuguese interpreter.
And to complete the farcical shenanigans at Safa, they've suddenly decided that Santana will no longer do one-on-one interviews until after the Nigeria game.
Apparently nosy hacks might just find out that he's not the one actually preparing the team. Like I said, more humiliation is on the horizon.
Mninawa Ntloko is Sports Editor
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