South Africa 2010

South Africa have had six years to prepare for the upcoming World Cup, plenty of time to put plans together for the team in comparison to the squeeze of building the requisite infrastructure.

The irony is that South Africa have come out tops as far as the new stadiums, roads, airports and other facilities are concerned but made a real hash of looking after their own team.

There is now a major crisis swirling around Bafana Bafana with some 40 days left to the opening match against Mexico at Soccer City in Johannesburg on June 11.

A major crisis

In fact, correction. Make that, more of a crisis. The side has been in freefall for years now and is given little hope, even by their most ardent supporters, at the tournament. The modest ambition is to avoid becoming the first host nation not to make it out of the opening round of a World Cup.

But at least they could have given themselves a realistic shot at something more glorious. Instead it has come clear over the last months that preparations for the World Cup have been poorly put together and the planning for the event itself almost non-existent.

Admittedly there has been a coaching change, and perhaps even more pertinent, a major administrative change at the football association, both inside the last year. But the total lack of responsibility around the team is deeply troubling for the home country.

For almost two years now, high profile coaches from across the world have been making their way to South Africa, looking at hotels, training pitches, doing reconnaissance trips on the freeways and back roads and generally preparing for every eventuality. There has been a lot of publicity around many of these visits.

The more confident teams came early. The Dutch, for example, who romped through the qualifying, signed an agreement with a Premier Soccer League club Bidvest Wits and are building a new clubhouse and field to fit in with their requirements.

Italy, Spain, England, the USA all spent significant time and money researching their options.

South African officials, as it transpires, were too busy glad-handing all their famous foreign guests to worry about their own team. Plans to rehabilitate the association's academy, which had been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair over the last years, never got off the ground, no one took any responsibility and the next time anyone checked it was too late in the day to start the project.

So while all 31 other finalists had bedded themselves in and chosen their base camps, the host nation were homeless. Eventually they had to settle for a suburban hotel and will share facilities with the Dutch.

Lack of planning

To add to that embarrassment has come tardy planning around a current training camp in Germany where coach Carlos Alberto Parreira had asked for a steady diet of team testing opposition but got instead a mix of Bundesliga reserve sides on the menu. He scrapped all the games!

Instead internationals against North Korea and Jamaica have been hastily arranged but the whole fiasco reinforces the image of incompetence that the South African Football Association had been hoping to rid itself of.

A month-long training camp in Brazil in March plus another three weeks in Germany also looks to have been a bit of charade. It has been for players from home clubs only, as the key foreign-based players are still completing their respective seasons

Coach Parreira tried to justify it by insisting at least 70 per cent of his current World Cup squad would come from locally-based players but he has since changed his tune, as we knew always knew he would.

There is no way he would have left out of the rump of the European-based players who have a lot more of the requisite experience and expertise the hosts will need at the World Cup.

In essence the training camps have been a glorified public relations bluster, designed to make everyone look feverishly busy before the tournament. The reality is just a handful of the players who have had seven weeks in costly foreign climes will actually take to the field at the upcoming tournament.

If the side don't do well, you will know why. If they succeed, it will be in spite of those supposed to smooth their path.

Yemmy Macclean
www.yemmymacclean.com