Beating France shouldn’t gloss over the real challenges South Africa still faces

Bafana still far from being real challenger

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Bafana Bafana left the World Cup with its head held high.

But before it can break through on the world scene and becoming a real contender, fundamental challenges remain for South Africa.

Young players need good coaching, better education and the guarantee of at least one meal a day in a nation where the majority black population, the bedrock of South African soccer, still face grinding poverty and a lack of good schools.

Ajax Cape Town coach Foppe de Haan, a Dutchman who once led the Netherlands under-20 team, sees the potential but even more so the work that needs to be done.

He said Wednesday that South Africa needs a “master plan” for its World Cup profits so that the country invests in youth, produces a top league and draws international coaches.

After the 2-1 win over France, one of the powerhouses of the game over the past 30 years, there was joy that South Africa looks to be truly on its way, even though the win was not enough to avoid first-round elimination.

“I believe the foundation is there for a bright future for South African football,” said coach Carlos Alberto Parreira.

The current reality, though, is still pretty ugly, as Ajax Cape Town Chairman John Comitis knows all too well.

For daily training, Ajax sends out five buses to the Cape townships that produced such players as Benni McCarthy and Quinton Fortune. What they collect even today is a lot of hungry bellies.

“Some of these players get one decent meal a day and that is the one they get at Ajax,” Comitis said. “They had no breakfast, two slices of bread.”

“The nourishment, for me, is something that is going to take a long time to correct. We still are experiencing it even now.”

When skinny kids are brought from the townships hungry, perfectly fed European kids head to training strong and ready to go. Undernourishment also affects growth for the rest of their lives and makes them more susceptible to disease.

There’s also the scourge of AIDS, which ravages the townships and kills South Africa’s youth by the thousands. South Africa, a nation of about 50 million, has an estimated 5.7 million people infected with HIV, more than any other country.

Beyond the fundamental problem of an insufficient diet, education is a constant concern for the black youths.

“They have not learned how to learn something,” De Haan said in an interview.

Black kids often attend school in huge classrooms where creative thinking comes a distant second to strict discipline. Add to that the fact their parents were educated under apartheid, when blacks were discouraged to think independently, and it throws up another big problem.

De Haan says it makes him remember of coaching forwards like Ruud van Nistelrooy of the Netherlands and Denmark’s Jon Dahl Tomasson. He said they reached the pinnacle of the sport due to hard work and because “they have open minds.”

That makes coaching all the more essential. There again, the challenges are huge for South Africa.

“It is the single most weakness of South African football in general and for that we can only blame the SAFA,” Comitis said of the South African Football Association.

Ajax Cape Town was set up in close partnership with the real Ajax, which has had excellent youth coaching and a slew of young international stars to prove it.

In South Africa, though, it is tough to find good youth coaches. And De Haan complained that SAFA has not called on him or Kaiser Chiefs’ Serb coach, Vladimir Vermezovic, to cooperate more closely to develop South African soccer.

And if they do not want to turn to foreign coaches, he said, at least they should look at the country’s rugby program, which has produced two world champion teams over the last 15 years.

“They are the best in the world,” De Haan said. “They look for talents and send them to special schools. They should do the same with football.”