SA coach the best option for Bafana Bafana
0 
Pitso Mosimane became the 14th coach of the South African soccer team, Bafana Bafana, on July 2010. He becomes the 8th South African coach to coach Bafana Bafana. The national team has been coached by 6 foreign coaches in the past.
The appointment of Mosimane is a good development for the team. After all, Bafana Bafana's most successful coach, Clive Barker, is South African. Foreign coaches never really do any good for Bafana Bafana and South African soccer in general.
All they seem to do is come in, take the big salaries being offered, then return back home without making any difference to the game. It's ironic that the foreign coaches are always offered bigger packages than local ones, considering that they always do worse than the local coaches.
When the country was re-admitted into the international community in the early 1990s, Stanley "Screamer" Tshabalala became the very first coach of the national team. It was a rocky start, as he was in charge of 6 matches, won 1, drew 1 and lost 4. Ephraim "Shakes" Mashaba was next (for his first stint), winning both the matches he was in charge of.
Then 1993 saw South Africa appointing its first foreign coach, in Augusto Palacios, from Peru. Palacios did not do badly at all, as he played 8, won 3, lost 3 and drew 2. But the national team really started coming of age after the appointment of Barker in 1994. He took over a team that was suffering from an identity crisis, caused by the constant chopping and changing of the head coach.
He literally had to start afresh and build a team that was stable and consistent. As it was to turn out, this proved to be the key ingredient in the success of the national team. He always retained a core group of players that he always relied upon to perform every time the team went into the field to face an opponent, and they never failed him.
This was an elite group of players who were the cream of South African soccer players at the time - players such as Doctor Khumalo, Linda Buthelezi, Shoes Moshoeu, Lucas Radebe, Sizwe Motaung, Philimon Masinga, Andre Arendse and Mark Williams.
Of course all this culminated in South Africa winning the prestigious continental championship, the African Nations Cup, on February 1996. There was no doubt in every soccer lover' s mind in South Africa that Bafana Bafana had arrived, and were ready to take on the world.
But things were soon to change.
For some reason the nation' s football administrators thought that replacing Barker with a foreign coach, just before the World Cup in France in 1998, was a good idea. Their argument was that, since the World Cup was a big international competition, it was necessary to bring in an international, specifically European, coach to guide our team, hence the appointment of Frenchman Philippe Troussier.
This happened after Jomo Sono, another South African, had taken over the team in the interim (for little over a month, between 24-01-98 and 28-02-98) while the search was still on for a new European coach.
The appointment of a European coach was seen as a positive step because it was assumed that he would bring in superior technical knowledge and training methods that were going to help condition Bafana Bafana to be able to perform on a par with their global counterparts.
It was shocking to witness the manner in which Barker was treated. He was removed from his position in a very unceremonious manner - merely because he was not European and hence perceived to be unfit to lead the national team against the best the world had to offer.
In the many interviews that followed he, like many a South African soccer lover, also expressed surprise and disappointment at the way his removal was carried out.
The powers that be at the South African Football Association (SAFA) could not come up with a coherent argument as to why Barker had to be removed; except of course to say that it was the best thing to do for the country - that the main reason for doing this was to prevent the county from being humiliated in front of the whole world.
But instead what happened at the tournament was disastrous for Bafana Bafana. The national team crashed out of the tournament in the first round, after failing to win a match. They were to be humiliated 3-0 in the opening match against the host France.
Philippe Troussier had decided to replace some of the tried and tested player that Barker had groomed and conditioned over years of training and mentoring, with unknown European-based players that he had gone on an unnecessary worldwide search for.
Nobody, including the coach himself, knew these players, and no one had seen then play as a unit. But the new coach believed that, the fact that they played in Europe should be good enough to enable them to somehow produce the results that the people back at home were hoping for.
He thought that he would just quickly assemble them and play them together, and hope for the best. But unfortunately they did not deliver (one of them even scored an own goal in the opening match); proving once again that European does not always necessarily mean better that local.
After this debacle, some sense seemed to have been knocked back into the heads of the football administrators.
They went back to a local coach, in Trott Moloto (03-10-98 to 03-09-00.) But the damage had already been done, so he needed to start afresh and build a team that would be consistent and bring in good, steady, results.
In the mean time Philippe Troussierhad come and gone with all those millions he was paid, without making any positive impact on South African soccer.
And the madness was to start again with the appointment of the Portuguese, Carlos Queiroz, on September 2000, who also did absolutely nothing for South African football, but was paid handsomely for it.
And after that we also saw more foreign coaches come and go, at different times, such as Englishman, Stuart Baxter, Carlos Santana (Brazil) and, recently, Carlos Alberto Perreira (Brazil); all of them making no meaningful contribution to South African football.
So Pitso Mosimane is certainly a breath of fresh air. His coaching credentials are very impressive. He coached the unfashionable Supersport United for7 years (2000 - 2007), in the process turning them into serious contenders for the league, and also winning a couple of cups with them.
He also went on to win the Coach of the Year accolade in the 2004/2005 season. He is one of the longest serving and highly-rated coaches in South African soccer.
He is also a former player of note, having played for four local professional soccer teams, before moving to Europe in 1989. He played for the national team four times, scoring a goal on his debut against Mauritius in an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier in 1993.
Another positive for him is that he has been part of the national soccer team coaching system for some time now. He led South Africa's Under-23 Olympic team in the 8 Nations tournament in France before becoming Bafana Bafana' s assistant coach in 2006 to Ted Dumitru at the African Nations Cup in Egypt, and became a full time assistant coach in 2007.
He furthermore played the role of a caretaker coach between April 2006 and November 2006, while the appointment of Carlos Perreira was still being finalised.
As a coach at Supersport United, he had a reputation for grooming young talent and bringing the best out of them. He also has the skill of turning ordinary, underperforming, players into decent players of note. So the South African national team is in good hands indeed.
One of the arguments against foreign coaches is that they usually come here with the aim of achieving short-term goals, such as winning tournaments and championships.
The aim is never to develop South African football, especially from the grassroots. One sees that in the fact that their squads are always composed of tried and tested European based players.
They do not pay attention at all to young, up and coming, locally based players that still need to be given a chance to prove themselves.
So the advantage of bringing in a locally based South African coach is that he is familiar with the local soccer environment, even at grassroots level. Hence he will have the inclination, and the time, to have a look even at the unknown young players playing in the lower division leagues.
