JOHANNESBURG - This is not how it was supposed to be. Baroka FC were meant to set the Absa Premiership alight, not hold the candle for the rest of the league.
After all, didn’t the team from my home village show their readiness for the elite league a few years ago?
Remember how they knocked both Chiefs and Swallows out of the Nedbank Cup when they were still in the lower leagues?
Even last season, they sent a couple of Premiership outfits, Arrows and Chippa, packing out of the country’s premier knockout competition.Out in Ga-Mphahlele, where they are based, celebrations abounded as 'Bakgaga' earned promotion and everyone foresaw a brilliant debut season for their team.
Damn, even coach Kgoloko Thobejane confidently promised that the team were not in the top league to add to the numbers but to win things.
How pear-shaped things have gone!
Sure, there is just a point separating them and fellow rookies Highlands Park. And Free State outfits Bloemfontein Celtic and FS Stars are just five points ahead. All it will take is a couple of victories and they will be out of the relegation quagmire, just as Platinum Stars extricated themselves from the danger zone with victory at the weekend.
But when a team lets in eight goals in just two matches without reply, you have to wonder if that victory will ever come.
Thobejane and his team will have to dig deep and find that swagger, spirit and drive which saw them take the NFD and Nedbank Cup by storm.
Failure to do so and they will be back in the lower division.
In hindsight, there are a few things Baroka got wrong upon their promotion. As admirable as their decision to keep faith with the players who earned them promotion was, such is the difficulty of elite football that chairman Khurishi Mphahlele should have beefed up the squad with quality players.
For even when they did in the January transfer window, it was not with seasoned and pedigreed players.
One got the impression that their beating Premiership clubs in the Nedbank Cup actually gave them a false sense of what awaited them in the top league. Yet had they done proper research, they would have known that there is a massive difference between the sprint that is the Cup and the marathon of the league campaign.
There are enough matches left for Baroka to salvage their status. But for that to happen everyone associated with the club is going to have to pitch up. More critically, they will have to learn to stop leaking goals like a sieve.
And what a better way to start than with the weekend’s Limpopo derby against Polokwane City......