Pitso Mosimane is the one thing SA football can celebrate

Durban - For over 20 years South African men’s football has been nothing but disappointment.

So depressed have the fans been that they have learnt ways of celebrating mediocrity, keeping hope in the face of repeated failure. We often overestimate talent and kindle false hope with the rare moment of happiness every now and then such as Sundowns’ triumph in the CAF Champions League in 2016.

While we still celebrate Sundowns’ 2016 success in Africa’s premier club competition, it’s a blemish that despite having the richest and most supported domestic league in Africa, only two South African clubs have ever won the continental competition (Orlando Pirates in 1995 and Sundowns in 2016).

Our national team Bafana Bafana have not qualified for a World Cup competitively since 2002. We got admission into the 2010 World Cup as hosts and even then embarrassed ourselves by becoming the first host nation to not progress beyond the first round of the competition.

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Had we been required to qualify competitively for the 2010 World Cup, we might not have been in that tournament. We did not qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) in Angola that same year and what’s more, we have failed to qualify for three Afcons since 2010.

The three times that we did qualify for the event, we did not progress further than the quarter-finals.

These failures alone suggest that there are serious problems in South African football which are structural. The worst part is that there has been no sense of accountability from anyone for the failure. Important structures have remained intact as Bafana Bafana progressed from failure to failure. There have been several