Wits must stop playing the blame game over Tyson’s Orlando Pirates link

I find both of these excuses rather poor, though I find Wits’  position with regard to the Confederation Cup more understandable than I do their stance on Hlatshwayo.

Wits head coach Gavin Hunt described a “media drive” to get Hlatshwayo to Pirates as “a bit disturbing,” just days after he himself had said all of his players had their price.

“Everybody is for sale,” said Hunt in KZN last weekend.

“My whole team is for sale. So if the price is right, you do what you have to do.”

The incongruence here is clear, and please stop with the conspiracy theories. There will always be speculation about player transfers, and there is usually no smoke without fire.

My opinion is that a move to Pirates for the Bafana captain would actually be a good one, and even Wits CEO Jose Ferreira might endorse this on the basis that Hlatshwayo would get to play in the Caf Champions League were he to move to the Buccaneers.

“I have discussed this with the coach. The Caf Champions League will always be an important competition for this club, but the Caf Confederation Cup is not a priority for this club – taking into account our financial resources and our ability to bring in more players to participate in this competition. It will not be a priority for us. We will primarily be focusing on domestic competitions,” said Ferreira.

“The costs of the Confederation Cup are a lot bigger than the costs of participating in the Champions League. Yet the prize money you get the further you go is like a fifth of playing in the Champions League. Take the SuperSport United scenario, where they went all the way to the final (in 2017), but the money that they got was less than their costs of participating. Yes, we will go out there and not throw games, but it is not a priority. But if we are in the Champions League, we will have a full go at winning it. There are clubs that are better resourced to participate in that competition.”

The Wits CEO has a point in the sense that the Confederation Cup is clearly under-resourced, and the continent’s organising body should really be doing more to help African clubs, and yet, Wits do have a tendency to talk about money, or a lack of it, more than any other club I know.

Hunt will, at almost every opportunity, tell you that his club don’t have money to buy players, when the reality is that if they can’t pay the massive transfer fees that a club like Sundowns does, for example, they are extremely competitive in terms of the wages that they pay.

Wits playing the paupers in the Caf Confederation Cup, and effectively saying they don’t mind being knocked out, seems more than a little disrespectful to both the competition and other clubs in the competition with way fewer resources than them.

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