Those hopeful sods who had one too many and dreamed that Bafana Bafana, the Proteas and the Springboks would all secure glory this year have had their balloons popped. There won’t be a national treble. Not this year, anyway.
Shakes Mashaba will be wondering where the love of 2014 has disappeared to. Just the other day, he was the saviour of diski, a working class hero restoring pride in the jersey, even in his dodgy checked blazers and loud shirts.
It’s no fun being a national coach. Always, there is a top chop who knows better, just waiting for a certain selection or substitution to go awry, so he can bleat his “Told you so” anthem.
And yet, barely a year ago, after the “bunch of winners” fiasco in the CHAN tournament, those same chops were praying for a coach they could identify with.
Mashaba’s mandate, lest we forget, was 2018. Sorry, his mandate is 2018. The sharp suits at Safa told us as much, long before he toppled Nigeria, the reigning African champions – for a few days more, anyway – and qualified for the Africa Cup of Nations where he and his team have become spectators.
The truth of the matter is that the national football team are a project still under construction. To use more familiar terms, Mashaba’s contract is for five years. As with most good contracts, the first two years weren’t expected to show much return. But Mashaba’s foundations came up in a hurry.
Subsequently, he raised expectations, and started getting a little ahead of himself, too. Instead of the Afcon tournament being a purely educational exercise, he had mild delusions of grandeur, suggesting that his green-horned side could go all the way.
Of course, his penthouse dreams were quickly crushed by the efficiency of streetwise opponents, who picked off his charges whenever they started self-doubting and retreating into their shells. Algeria, Senegal and Ghana all leaned heavily on their European-based stars, especially when things got tight.
Mashaba went the other way. He dispensed with some of his expensive and high-maintenance imported attacking weapons and opted to use more humble and homely means to try to negotiate his way through African traffic.
There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, much of Bafana’s play suggested a promising future. Dean Furman continues to grow as a leader, but the side lacked a creative figure who could stamp his mark on the game and provide them with a touch of composure when they were at sixes and sevens.
These are lessons Bafana could learn only on the job. The argument that the side were too inexperienced was only going to be proved otherwise on this stage. Members like Erick Mathoho and Sibusiso Vilakazi will be better players for it, not least because they showed they could hold their own at this level.
So Bafana’s shot at glory was short-lived. The baton of national hope has been passed to the Proteas. Truth be told, they always looked like South Africa’s sincerest shot at being champions this year.
Unlike Bafana, they have experience. Plenty of it, too. They have match winners, with bat and ball. AB de Villiers’s men have a lot of bases covered. It is open to debate what the run buffet served up by the West Indies over the past month has done for their preparations, but you can play only what’s in front of you.
Russell Domingo insists it is no big deal that his side have not been placed too much under pressure this summer. They have been under pressure for 18 months, anyway, he points out.
Like Bra Shakes, the likeable Domingo has talked up his side’s chances of going all the way at the World Cup. Somehow, Domingo’s offering seems more hopeful. And so it should be.
The Cricket World Cup has never loved South Africans, any cynical and deeply wounded fan will tell you wearily, the memory of 1992, and 1999, and 2003 still too fresh in the mind. But maybe, just maybe, at the scene of the mugging of 1992, the cricket gods will finally smile on South African cricket.