Another international tournament is scheduled to begin without the senior South African men’s international soccer team.
The Bafana Bafana are not part of the African Nations Championship (Chan), scheduled to be played in Algeria between January 13 and February 4.
South Africa were knocked out by Angola during qualifying in September last year, following a 4-1 defeat on home soil, which resulted in a 6-1 aggregate defeat after also losing 2-0 in Angola.
The absence of the team has become increasingly worryingly common for a country that took world soccer by storm in the early years after the demise of apartheid.
These days, they are a shadow of the team that reached great heights between 1995 and 2002. So much so, that having missed out on both the Qatar World Cup and the African Cup of Nations (Afcon) in 2022, the Bafana Bafana now have neither. managed to qualify for Chan.
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Just as they last qualified for the World Cup in 2010 as hosts, the South African men last qualified for the Chan tournament in 2014, when they hosted. They did not make it to the 2016 edition in Rwanda, nor to the 2018 masterpiece that was held in Morocco. They were also absent in 2020.
Considering the prestige (or lack thereof) associated with the tournament, Chan de Bafana’s failures might be excusable in another life.
However, when one considers that their failures have extended to the World Cup and even Afcon, it suggests a worrying trend for the future of South African football.
Although the Bafana played in the 2010 World Cup, they last qualified for the tournament on merit in 2002. At Afcon, before missing out in 2022 when the tournament was held in Cameroon, they reached the quarterfinals. final in 2019. Before that, they were left out of participating in 2010, 2012 and 2017.
It is a far cry from the standard set by the generation of Bafana Bafana players who managed to win the competition in 1996, before claiming the silver and bronze medals during the 1998 and 2000 editions respectively.
What is Chan?
Bafana’s failures in this particular competition may well be because they are something of a black sheep when it comes to international tournaments. For one thing, the only players who can be picked for their countries are the ones residing in their respective countries.
Then there’s the not-so-minor drawback of not falling within a window prescribed by Fifa. This means that national league clubs are not required to release their players to participate in the tournament, even if the action may increase their countries’ chances of winning.
This is what Bafana Bafana head coach Hugo Broos alluded to when his team failed to book their ticket to Algeria. For the tournament qualifiers, the 70-year-old Belgian coach had handed over the reins to his assistant, Helman Mkhalele.
“It was very difficult for the coach to say which players could play in Chan. But then I saw that the Angolan team was camping for a month. They played against Cosafa and they played against Mauricio. Then they played against us. [in the Chan qualifiers]. We didn’t have the luxury of having a team together, at the beginning, to play against Cosafa and Chan,” Broos said at the time.
While Broos is right, this doesn’t explain Bafana’s other failures in the past.
Clubs in the South African Premier Soccer League (PSL) have generally mocked the tournament since its first edition in 2009. Teams in the league have often refused to release their best players to take part in the competition.
As a result, the Bafana have regularly been forced to rely on players on the fringes of their clubs, hardly ideal conditions for participating in a continental tournament.
Moroccan plane
Granted, Morocco recent success is due to a number of factors. However, his two-title success in the 2018 and 2020 Chan competitions cannot be ignored as a key to his development.
With the back-to-back wins, Morocco proved that they have one of the best domestic leagues on the continent, a claim backed up by their powerful performance in Qatar.
Jawad El Yamiq, who shone for Morocco during the 2022 World Cup, moved from Raja Casablanca to Italy’s Genoa following his showings as Morocco won its first Chan title in 2018.
A similar story can be told of Moroccan striker Soufiane Rahimi, whose market value soared during the 2020 tournament, earning him a move to United Arab Emirates giants Al Ain.
This latest edition of Chan, which was initially scheduled for 2022 but halted due to Covid concerns, has since been rocked by news that the defending champions will not participate.
Development originates from long standing political tension between Morocco and Algeria, which intensified in 2021 and caused the latter to ban direct flights from Morocco to its country.
Despite the restriction of airspace between the two countries as a result of the clash, the Moroccan Football Federation insisted on a direct flight from Rabat to its base city in Algeria. With no response from Algiers, the World Cup finalists reportedly called off their title defense. MD
