The problems with CHAN from South African football’s perspective are obvious. To keep it short:
1) CHAN matches do not fall within the FIFA international calendar, which means clubs are not obliged to release players.
2) There is usually important club football on when CHAN matches are played, which means PSL and even NFD clubs will never release their best players.
3) It’s a catch-22 situation because, since 2014, the results count towards FIFA rankings, which affect our seeding in tournaments draws, yet Bafana Bafana cannot field its strongest team due to the above reasons. (In fact, no African team can because their best exports are ineligible.)
SAFA needs to change the way it approaches this tournament, because if we’re trying to win these matches to improve our rankings, it’s putting the cart before the horse.
Is it not better to develop the core of a team over time that could eventually beat higher-seeded opponents rather than try to win now with more senior players, only to boost the nation's morale, or to avoid the higher seeds at the start of tournaments (and then lose to them later anyway)?
The development approach is what Vision 2022 is all about, and CHAN is exactly the type of tournament where you can experiment and groom potential Bafana players for the future.
Right now Bafana Bafana coach Shakes Mashaba is soaking up the Caribbean sun and telling the players how brilliant they are after what can only be described as a morale-boosting friendly win over Costa Rica (because there is no other point of playing against Central American teams when there are two gruelling and extremely important fixtures against an African team just around the corner).
All the while, Thabo Senong has been tasked with getting a group of club non-regulars match-fit, to become familiar with each other and to form a competitive team – with a little more than a week until the first CHAN qualifier against Angola on October 17 at Rand Stadium.
Mashaba and his assistant Owen da Gama will fly back and join Senong after the Honduras friendly.
Obviously, whoever is really in charge of the CHAN team is on a hiding to nothing already, and the suspicion is that names like Senong, Helman Mkhalele and Shaun Bartlett have been mentioned only to take some of the attention away from the under-pressure Mashaba, who needs positive results.
Earning a senior international cap used to be an honour. Today the Bafana Bafana jersey is available just as easily as the cheap replica shirts you can buy on the streets.
Very few, if any, of these players will gain anything from the tournament other than adding ‘senior international’ to their CVs. (Shakes Mashaba has now given more than 100 different players caps since taking over from Gordon Igesund.)
Now because the supporters demand results, and because those results also affect our FIFA rankings, the selectors have gone for a mix of experience and youth, and not taken the opportunity to go all-out with Vision 2022 and play more Under-23s or Under-20s, which would give those players already playing in those national teams some continuity and further exposure to the rigours of continental football.
By my count, three or four players in the CHAN squad were in Owen da Gama’s last Under-23 squad (probably because clubs would not release others) and five were in the Amajita squad that played at the CAF Youth Championships back in March.
Five out of 26 is not enough.
However, this may be a moot point anyway as Senong has said the Under-20 team is in a rebulding phase again, whatever that means.
SAFA will also reason that all of our junior national teams are busy at the moment and therefore there is no need to play more Under-20 or Under-23 players at CHAN, but I beg to differ.
The problem with playing Under-20 international football is that you are playing against other Under-20 players. This means that every other player is more or less on the same level as you, yet to improve as a player you have to challenge yourself at a higher level.
A good example of why youngsters need to be played at senior level is Khayelihle Shozi at Mamelodi Sundowns (who by the way is not in the CHAN squad even though he fits the criteria and plays for the Under-23s, perhaps because Pitso Mosimane would not release him but more likely because Mashaba wanted to give somebody else a chance).
A few weeks ago Shozi looked brilliant in the MultiChoice Diski Challenge against Kaizer Chiefs Reserves, he terrorised them down the right flank and I could see after only a few minutes of football why this player was registered for the first team.
But could Shozi play in the PSL right now? Of course he has talent, but he has not played against PSL-calibre players and is therefore untested at the highest level in South Africa. It’s the same reason (along with the bloated squad at Sundowns) why the highly rated Percy Tau doesn’t get a game in the first team – he’s also not ready.
Now, the same problem exists in the national team tiers. As an example, Keagan Dolly looks like a world-beater in the Under-23s, helped by the fact that he is playing against other Under-23s. Now (a) when will he get called up to the senior team and (b) is he ready to play against senior international opponents when our own senior internationals are struggling against Africa’s disrespectively-so-called ‘weaker’ teams?
The point is, what will happen to the likes of Mario Booysen, Wayne Sandilands or Bradley Grobler after CHAN? Will they be selected for an Afcon or World Cup squad? The answer is no.
So why not call other players with a possible international future? The list of stand-by players for development purposes simply has to be longer than one for Bafana reserves or there is something fundamentally wrong.
And since development is such a buzzword at SAFA right now, what will happen to the youngsters in the CHAN squad that have only been chosen because they aren’t good enough yet to feature in the PSL? How many others, besides those he has already called, will Owen da Gama select for the CAF 8-Nations tournament in December?
Will any of them be hand-picked and specifically groomed through the national team tiers for 2022 (Neil Tovey, maybe you can answer)?
CAF president Issa Hayatou said this in 2014 after FIFA agreed to make CHAN matches A-internationals: “This marks an important step taken towards the development of this competition and of football on the local level within the continent.
“It shall further encourage the youth of our continent, for whom the CHAN had been created to serve as an additional platform that brings to the attention of the world all the talents of which Africa is loaded.”
Nice and fuzzy as that sounds, all CHAN is now is a shop window for foreign clubs to poach young African players, which is the opposite of CAF’s original intention to “develop African leagues”.
Which “young” players in South Africa’s CHAN squad could get poached? Thabo September? Michael Morton? Maybe Bongani Ndulula?