Pirates legend wants PSL teams to take Caf competition serious

Speaking to Phakaaathi, Motale outlined his “problem” with teams not taking the Champions League and the Confederation Cup with the level of seriousness that he believes should be applied.

In recent years, however, Mamelodi Sundowns and SuperSport United impressively flew the South African flag high when they won the 2016 Champions League title and finished as 2017 Confederation Cup runners up respectively.

But, “Magents” wants to see all teams gunning for African glory.

“I am having a problem if other teams are competing in Africa and they don’t really take it seriously. I think the PSL (Premier Soccer League) and Safa (South African Football Association) must come up with a strict rule that will force teams to take Caf seriously,” said Motale.

The 52-year-old legend was not surprised to see Bafana Bafana missing the flight to the 2018 Fifa World Cup in Russia to be stage in less than four months’ time, saying clubs are key to Bafana’s success.

“If clubs are not successful, then we will continue to cry when it comes to Bafana Bafana,” he insisted.

Taking a more humorous approach, Motale wonders if S’bonelo Madela – the sangoma who reportedly demanded that Safa pay him a fortune in order to ensure Bafana’s success – was paid or not.

“I don’t know if they [Safa] paid the sangoma because it is one factor,” he quipped.

“I remember the old man’s words saying as long as he hasn’t been paid, Bafana are going nowhere. Even up to today no one has said if he is paid or not.”

The biggest challenge for SA teams has been trying to balance the domestic calendar – which runs from August to May – while Caf’s starts from February and ends in December.

SuperSport are exemplary of that as they are still struggling to recover from their 2017 Confed’ Cup endeavor. Pirates have also not seemingly rediscovered the form that saw them reach the 2013 and 2015 Champions League and Confederation Cup finals respectively.

Caf has proposed that the Caf schedule will now run parallel to the domestic calendar from August 2019. The 2019 editions of the Champions League and Confederation Cup are set to begin in December this year immediately after the 2018 finals, and will be concluded in May 2019.

However, Motale is not convinced that synchronizing the two calendars will help much.

“The calendar does not matter much. Yes there will be enough time to rest and so on. I don’t want to compare apples and bananas, but if you look overseas, they play throughout the year with a lot of competitions in between such as World Cup Qualifiers and so on.

“At one some stage they play even during the Christmas period and on New Year’s Day. One team can play Wednesday, Saturday, Tuesday and Friday. So the calendar doesn’t bother me much. The calendar is not going to make us win if we’re not going to apply proper training,” said Motale.

He continued: “What bothers me most is; do we plan for these things? If you know that two months down the line that you will be playing in Champions League or the Confederation Cup, you must plan as a coach and know that this is the training that you will give your team so that come weekend when you play the league, the players are not fatigued.”