After decades of disappointment, hurt and underachievement, Bafana Bafana stand on the brink of history this Fifa week. Two more victories are all our national team need to qualify for next year’s World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.
Should they get those six points from Lesotho today and Nigeria on Tuesday, Bafana will have secured a ticket to the World Cup for the first time through qualification since 2002. That is a long time for a country which returned to the international fold in the early ’90s with so much promise – taking just a few years to win the Africa Cup of Nations in 1996, and qualifying for the first World Cup in France in 1998.
Because of that great start to life in international football, after years of apartheid isolation, we somewhat lost the plot. In the intervening period, Bafana regressed badly after qualifying for the World Cup in Korea/Japan in 2002, with the event we hosted in 2010 being our only saving grace.
Even in that 2010 World Cup, while earning worldwide praise for hosting the global event, our national team grossly underperformed, becoming the first hosts to be bundled out of the tournament after just three matches. It was an anticlimax to what was a wonderful event – a first World Cup on African soil.
Since then, we have yearned to be in the tournament again as worthy participants who earned the spot through qualifying – rather than as hosts.
Hugo Broos, in a matter of four years since he took over the reins, has made us believe it’s all possible. With Bafana top of their group, we should have an unassailable lead if we add two more victories today and Tuesday.
We acknowledge celebrations could well be muted, with threats of our team losing three points gained from the first-leg win over Lesotho in March, due to the Teboho Mokoena saga, wherein he played when he was not supposed to, as he had received two bookings.
We have already lamented that it was an amateurish administrative blunder by the notoriously incompetent Safa, but even if we were to lose those three points, we are confident Broos can take our team to the promised land, with two more matches to follow in October .
We trust that all is in order – players are fit and ready, and yellow cards have been checked – as we prepare for wild celebrations in Mangaung this weekend.
SowetanLIVE
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