Safa simply don’t deal in realistic

If the South African Football Association are to be believed, the search will begin in earnest this week for a new Bafana Bafana head coach, tasked to take the team into the 2022 Fifa World Cup finals in Qatar.

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Molefi Ntseki’s sacking was inevitable after he failed to qualify the side for the Africa Cup of Nations finals in Cameroon next year, as inevitable, frankly, as the lack of accountability at Safa for the situation, which has seen coach after coach sacked over more than two decades of under-achievement.

It is not even a case of whether Ntseki deserved to be sacked – that is another argument for another day.

It is simply to say that the axe is Safa’s go-to mechanism when Bafana Bafana fall apart, as they do more and more often.

Selection of the next victim, sorry coach, will no doubt depend on a few factors, one being just how much money Safa are prepared to spend.

The organisation, according to their latest financial records, turned a profit of R54 million this year, but that followed a loss of R74 million in the previous financial year, and Safa do not have a recent record of spending bags of money on a new head coach, even when they say they will.

It was Safa president Danny Jordaan in February 2017, following the sacking of Shakes Mashaba, who stated that money would be no object in the hiring of a new head coach, only for cash flow to indeed appear to be the main problem in getting Carlos Queiroz or Herve Renard.

So even if Safa make bravado statements about a willingness to splash the cash, it is safer to simply wait and see who they appoint.

Gordon Igesund, Shakes Mashaba, Stuart Baxter and Ntseki, Bafana’s last four coaches, do not scream of wads of moola thrown around in search of the best men to lead the country.

Ntseki, there is little doubt, to borrow from a phrase that annoyed the heck out of Mashaba, was the “cheapest option” of the lot.

Renard is currently coach of Saudi Arabia, and the chances of prising him from his contract at a price the Saudis will accept is, to be fair, probably off-limits for most associations.

Queiroz is free, in theory, after his sacking by Colombia, but has way more pedigree than he had back in the early 2000s, when he last coached Bafana, so he would not come cheap.

Following that, of course, is whether a coach would actually want the Bafana job, if it was offered to him?

Could Queiroz really be bothered to deal with the politics he knows all about from his first stint?

Would Pitso Mosimane really want to leave a plum job at Cairo giants Al-Ahly to try again with Bafana?

Would Benni McCarthy give up far less pressure at AmaZulu, with plenty of money to spend, for the heat of coaching the senior national team?

And then there is the mandate to qualify the team for the World Cup…it isn’t realistic, given Bafana’s descent down the continental pecking order.

Safa don’t deal in realistic. And that is a problem facing anyone who takes over the job.

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