South
Africa’s Minister of Sports has labelled the Bafana Bafana as “a bunch of
losers” as well as describing their performance against Nigeria as “useless,”
following their embarrassing elimination from the African Nations Championship.
The
hosts of the tournament for home-based players lost
3-1 to Nigeria on Sunday to suffer a humiliating exit.
“What
I saw was not a problem of coaching, it was a bunch of losers,” Fikile Mbalula
told a news conference.
“That
mediocrity that was displayed… we must never wake up to that again.”
Bafana
Bafana finished third in Group A, having lost to Nigeria, drawn with Mali and
beaten only Mozambique.
Mbalula
believes their failure to reach the knockout stage shows there are fundamental
problems with the team.
“Their
performance was not even lacklustre, it was useless. We must go back to the drawing
board,” he said.
“We
indeed have a crisis of monumental proportions. We don’t have a crisis of
talent, we have a crisis of putting everything together.
“I
felt like just standing up and walking out (the stadium). I saw people lining
up after the game to greet them… I won’t greet them, I didn’t even call them.
“In
Africa we have won nothing – we are the laughing stock. This generation of
players we must forget.”
South
Africa failed to qualify for this year’s World Cup in Brazil, and since 2008
they have only played at tournaments they have hosted, which include the 2010
World Cup.
“We
aren’t going to this year’s World Cup. But Iran is going and yet there is no
football there,” added Mbalula.
“We
hosted the Africa Cup of Nations in 2013 and could not get to the final. We
also hosted CHAN and ended up going out in the group stages.
“If we
were united we would have done our best and won CHAN by stopping the league for
one month to concentrate on this.”
Source : BBC
No comments:
Post a Comment