South African sports fans might be the most reactive in the world. Nowhere does national pride (what some might call arrogance) swell so much after a national team win in any of the major team sports. Nowhere does the angst overtake so quickly after one of the teams suffers defeat. Bafana Bafana’s thrilling recent victory over Norway had the accolades flying. The national soccer team then followed that win with a fairly lousy defeat at the hands of globel football power Portugal, and the brickbats emerged (Bafana Bafana need to bulk up to take on bigger teams! Bafana Bafana need better leadership!) Being a South African sports fan is a vertiginous experience.
With the World Cup just over a year away, expect this reactionary tendency to increase, not only in terms of Bafana Bafana’s ability to bring both shame and joy to the nation’s millions, oftentimes within the same week, but also in terms of the focus on the country’s preparations to host the world’s biggest team sporting event proving to be a grand Rorschach test of the South African self image.
It is not all sturm and drang in South African football circles, despite former Bafana Bafana coach and current Portugal manager Carlos Queiroz’s assertion that South African fortunes had flagged largely because of the country’s inability or unwillingness to follow his tean-year plan that he believes (natch) surely would have brought the national soccer team unimaginable successes. On Wednesday the Pretoria News ran a story informing its readers that current Bafana Bafana coach Joel Santana had so impressed the leadership of the Mamelodi Sundowns in the wake of the Norway victory that they wanted him to accept their multi-million rand offer to take over the storied South Africa Premiere League team. The result was more sturm and drang as the story understandably caused an uproar. But it was all just an April Fool’s joke — and a pretty good one that would have been made even better had the editors not tipped their hand at the top of the story.
In any case, expect the (p)recriminations to continue every time Bafana Bafana perform well in the months to come. Expect outsized optimism every time they prevail. That’s the lot of the South African sports fan. Enjoy the ride!
