‘The goal is to do well at Afcon 2013’

INLSA

There's a couple of players - I don't want to mention names - that are really playing at a very high level in Europe at the moment, Igesund said after his team was cheered off the pitch at Mbombela Stadium.

Nelspruit - On the eve of a second international friendly soccer match in four days, Bafana Bafana coach Gordon Igesund says his focus is on the African Nations Cup in 2013.

In his first game in charge, Igesund was applauded for a good showing by the national team, which held five-times world champions Brazil for 75 minutes before conceding a goal to go down 1-0 away in Sao Paulo on Friday.

Tonight, Bafana face a Mozambican side ranked 10 spots below them in the African rankings at Mbombela Stadium in Nelspruit, and it will present a vastly different prospect for Igesund’s troops.

“The bigger picture here is that we haven’t got a lot of time before the African Cup of Nations,” Igesund said after the team’s training session on Monday. “I can’t get this message across more importantly than that... it is what our big picture is.

“It’s not important for us to have fantastic 4-0 results and not do well in the African Cup of Nations,” he said. “Of course we want to do both, but there’s no time.”

Igesund made the point that, with any kind of change, real progress took time and, with Afcon 2013 looming around the corner in January, the players would have to make the most of their opportunities.

“There’ll be lots of changes taking place, there’s lots of new players in the squad,” he said. “There’s a completely new formation we’re playing, there’s a whole new thing going on, and these things take time.”

He also warned that there would be no room for complacency in his team.

“We played against Brazil in front of 50 000 people and the guys were pumped up,” he said. “They need to be equally pumped up when we play against Mozambique, or whether we play Namibia, or whoever. They need to have the same attitude, the same commitment, the same passion, the same driving force that we had before and that’s what we want to do.”

Sapa